And to make matters worse, the ventilation system in the sleeping quarters had started making that noise again. A sort of VWOOMP VWOOMP rattle that only ever occused between two and four AM, and was vaguely reminescent of one of these big helicopters that had ferried Chuck around in basic training. He remembered being sick in one of those helicopters. Good times.

As the elevator rattled and shook its way up Trout’s communication tower, Chuck made a mental note to tell the maintenance team to check the ventilation filters again. The rattling had been an issue for months and it was honestly starting to drive him around the bend. The sleeping quarters were supposed to be silent.

When he had first seen his assigned bunk room, three years ago, it had seemed to him like a silent tomb. Eighty feet underground, deep in the bowells of a state-of-the-art secret military bunker, it was a room about the same size as his grandmother’s bathroom in which someone had shoved enough beds for six people. The walls felt heavy, the ceiling was low, and it was pretty much impossible to forget all of the tens of thousands of pounds of rock, steel and concrete sitting right on top of his head. Back then, the ventilation had run smoothly, and the corridors were still empty of the beehive of human activity that their sheer size promised. The bunk room was enclosed in a perfectly claustrophobic silence that promised an equal chance of the best sleep of his life or a panic attack.

But then Bouchard, his future personal nemesis, had poked his head into the room behind him. Upon seeing the poster on the wall warning them about “enemy agents subverting them via sexual promiscuity”, he’d let out a noise between a snort and a braying laugh. Chuck had not known peace since.

A full minute and a half after he’d boarded it, the elevator shuddered to a halt with an unpleasant lurch that sloshed the coffee inside of his stomach and made him wince. A second passed, punctuated by the murmur of machinery sliding into place, and the doors slid open with a smoothness that belied the immense weight of the heavy metals Chuck knew they were lined with.

Beyond was a buzz of activity. The circular room was packed with dozens upon dozens of desks and workstations, all separated by chin-high little walls faintly humming with the tell-tale vibration of privacy fields. Large screens hovered in mid-air, the information displayed on them incomprehensible to anyone looking at them without smart lenses equipped with the proper decryption algorithm. To this day, Chuck still didn’t know if the screens served any purpose at all, as no one ever seemed to pay them any mind. There had been a rumour a few years back that old Colonel Brown had only had them installed to obscure some other spending from being too obvious on his budget. But that was before Chuck had joined the bunker’s administrative team. He made sure that none of that budget-shuffling nonsense happened on his watch!

“Hi Bee!”, he chirped as he pranced up to his best friend’s workstation at the far back of the room. As the most senior member of the comms team on staff, she alone had the privilege of an unobstructed view out of the tower’s windows. She needed it to keep an eye on the various transmitters and antennas and what-have-you that dotted the side of the building. She also had a larger desk and a repair bench, on which she fixed some of the smaller electronic parts of the antenna array when she couldn’t be arsed to bring them down to the larger repair shop inside the bunker.

This tower was the only part of the base that wasn’t underground, and Chuck loved it. The long elevator ride to get up there was meh, but the view out from the large bay windows all around the circular room couldn’t be beat. Vast purple clouds swirled in lazy spirals around the planet down below. The large band of asteroids, dust and ice forming the gaz giant’s rings flanked their own little chunk of rock like they were but one of the many jewels of a crown. On the surface of their moonlet, the inhabitants of Castulla Signal Station Trout were just starting to wake up. The force field that contained their fake atmosphere glittered like mist over their head. Soon, the field would be flooded with luminescent particles to create the illusion of dawn. They were much too far away from this system’s sun for it to be any bigger than a pinprick in the sky, but the fake blue sky created by the force field looked almost the same as on his home planet. Almost.

“Hi Chuck. You’re not supposed to be here,” Bee reminded him without looking up from her instruments. “You don’t have the clearance.”

He didn’t, but he had ways to fool the elevator into bringing him up here. Mysterious ways. Ways that involved bypassing the thumb print scanner with the emergency switch.

Chuck leaned on the edge of her console and rolled his eyes. “Please. What am I gonna see?” He squinted at the squiggly lines on her screen. “Classified sound waves?”

“Squealing Gulls Puncture Hulls,” she mumbled absently, the much-repeated OPSEC slogan tumbling from her lips almost as a reflex.

Bee finished noting down something then ran a hand through her short black hair, tucking some stray strands back behind her ear. She was a small woman, especially compared to Chuck. The top of her head barely reached his shoulders when they were standing side-by-side, and her limbs were like tiny toothpicks compared to his comfortably large everything. She had a pale, winter complexion that looked at odds with her bright orange uniform, while Chuck knew that his own dark skin made him look great with the sunshine yellow sergeant jacket. He also knew that he was one of the only people on base who actually managed to pull off the yellow, and he was damn proud of it. (Said jacket also made him look a bit more alive even when he was running on negative zero sleep, which felt like a blessing, given that he was almost always running on negative zero sleep.)

 Bee looked sharp all over, from the obsessively straight line of her fringe to her piercing brown eyes. But Chuck knew that behind her fussy manners and almost cold demeanour, she hid a big heart and an unashamed depth of caring that most people just didn’t understand.  She looked up at him, mouth half-open to say something, then took a good look at his face and winced.

“Oof. How much sleep did you get?”

“Two hours and a half. Just about.”

“And how many cups of coffee?”

“That’s confidential. Squealing gulls and all that.”

She made a commiserating sound. “Is Bouchard’s nose making weird sounds again?”

He sighed. “You have no idea. It’s like he’s got a shipload of snot stuck up in there and he just keeps insisting on breathing through it. I swear, one day I’ll hook up a pump to his face just to see what comes out. I bet it’ll be super gross.”

Bee wrinkled her face at him and started rummaging around her desk. “While you’re here, bring down those documents to Colonel Devi, would you? There’s a weird interference with the radar dish and I want to run some tests. It might take me several hours.” She handed him a large stack of papers. “But don’t look at them. They’re classified, sergeant. You do remember what that means, right?”

He tucked the documents under his arm and snapped her a lazy salute. “Aye aye, lieutenant! Are you gonna be done by tonight, though? We have that housewarming thingy. At the… Baker’s? No, the Fourniers.”

She pushed her hair back behind her ears again, eyes already back on her screen. Her hands started flying across her keyboard, the complex silver curves of her splint rings flashing in the fluorescent light. “Joan and Michel, yeah. I should be done by then. What about you?” Her eyes flicked up to his briefly. “Are you gonna make it? No offence but you look like shit, my dude.”

Chuck shrugged and waved a hand lazily. “Sure. I might skip down to fifth level and catch a nap after lunch, though. I’m sure no one will miss me. My job practically does itself anyway.”

“Again? I don’t know how you can even go down down there. That floor is creepy, man. It’s all empty rooms and unused offices. Like a ghost town.”

“Counterpoint: it’s silent,” he said. “Great sleep to be had there.”

She rolled her eyes. “If you keep doing that, one day you’re gonna get caught.”

He shrugged. “Then I get caught. No biggie. Napping on the clock isn’t a crime.”

Bee crossed her arms, unimpressed. “It’s grounds for dismissal. And you’re napping on the clock in the King’s room.”

“That he never uses!” He waved both of his hands this time, almost sending the papers flying. “He’s never set a single foot in this bunker and probably never will! It’s all a bit of a waste, if you ask me. Most comfortable damned bed on this entire asteroid! A double bed, Bee! With extra room and everything!”

“Moonlet. We’re on a Moonlet. And a double bed isn’t that big. It’s what, 54 inches?”

“Whatever, nerd.” He rolled his eyes. “I’ll see you at lunch.”

Bee smirked and waved. “Get out of here, you jock. And don’t forget to deliver those papers. Before your nap, preferably.”