Setting the scene!
Meetings and duct crawls. Mostly the latter, thank Eru. If I wanted to spend my life sitting around a table and listening to reports, I’d have stayed on Earth.
The one today wasn’t so bad, though. I just met everybody else in Maintenance. Twenty minutes of introductions and downloads, and then we all went off to do some hands-and-knees. I’d like to think that’s how it’s always gonna go, but I know life doesn’t work like that.
There’s ten of us first-timers, so Maintenance assigned two of us to one of the existing teams. We’ll be going over each of the main systems in turn, then get permanent assignments based on — nobody said. Probably they’ll flip coins. Which is okay; it’s not like I dream think about getting assigned to Life Support. Electrician’s work is fun but it’s not why I went to space, right?
I said Life Support because that’s what we did today. Our team lead was Sarai. She’s from SEDA, although we’re not supposed to care about that out here. Still, it was nice to ease into the entire ‘international brotherhood’ thing.
“Every system is equal, but Life Support is more equal than others,” she said, and smiled when Daniel and I laughed. Oh, right, Daniel is the other first-timer. Also the only other American first-timer, even if he’s hispanic, not anglo. Still, we both read Animal Farm in school.