A/N: Thanks to everyone who has left comments so far! I really appreciate them :)
Meredith was dreaming of her mother's house in Florida, the sweet steamy air and the constant rustle of the jasmine growing over the porch, the smoke from her mother's cigarettes, the green light falling dappled through the windows.
And then she wasn't.
Consciousness slammed into her, violent and sudden. She was aware of the cryo fluid rushing through her system, and the fragrant sense memory of Florida fell away, replaced by the cold humming of the ship's engines. The bright track lighting hurt her eyes, and her stomach was churning around, roiling like a storm -
She leaned over the edge of her cryochamber and vomited on the floor.
"Ms. Vickers, I'm here to offer assistance. I have towels."
Towels, Meredith thought stupidly, and then, with a jolt and a cold creep of dread, she recognized the voice.
She lifted her head and found David standing before her, towels draped over his arm, as he promised. He also carried a metal bowl, which he offered to her. She only stared at it.
"David?" Her voice hissed like an accusation.
"Yes. Mr. Weyland sent me to ensure you got settled properly."
Meredith's stomach lurched again. She grabbed the bowl from David and vomited again, ropes of pale cryo-fluid. She could feel him standing there, staring at her, waiting with his towels. It was humiliating.
"Leave me alone," she muttered, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. "Go help the captain."
"Captain Dorca has no need for my assistance. He's made this journey several times. In face, he's already in the dining area. You can join him as soon as you're feeling better."
Meredith glanced around the room and found the cryochamber where the captain had been sleeping. It hung open and empty. She leaned over the bowl and dry-heaved. It was true that his was her first time on a hypership - she'd never travelled further than Mars, a fact she'd not found embarrassing until now, knowing that the captain, the only other human on the ship, had rolled out of his cryochamber as easily as if he had rolled out of bed.
She vomited again, mostly clear bile, and David knelt beside her and moved to wipe her face with one of his towels. She pushed him away.
"I can do it myself," she said, grabbing at the towel. Her hands shook. David took the bowl away from her and stepped off to the side while she wiped her face clean. She'd read about the after-effects of the cryochambers - the vomiting and the shivering and the disorientation - but that intellectual knowledge hadn't been enough to prepare her. Not at all.
She was beginning to see her father's point about experience versus education. And she hated that education was where apparently excelled.
"Once you've showered and dressed, you'll need to eat something," David said.
"I know."
"We're waiting in the planet's orbit right now. When you're ready, we'll descend." He gave her a cold smile and Meredith stared up at him, her whole body still shaking. Mr. Weyland sent me to ensure you got settled properly. She didn't believe that for a fucking second. She'd allowed herself a few moments of naivete on Mars, but she'd always known this assignment was not so straightforward as it appeared. Her father had sent David to administer whatever tests he had planned for her out here on the edge of civilization. David would watch her, she understood, he would record her, and he would report back every show of weakness.
Damn him and his towels.
Meredith stood up, stretching out her body for the first time in three months. David watched her with his placid and uncanny expression.
"I'm going to wash up," she said. "I expect to be ready to go planetside within the hour."
David smiled like this pleased him. "Very good to hear, ma'am."
Meredith hadn't had much time to study LV-183 before she had to board the Antigone. Her father had only given her three weeks to settle her affairs for the next two years: to drop her classes at school, to make arrangements for an acquaintance to sublet her apartment, to say goodbye to her professors and the few girls she called friends. She wasn't even able to tell her mother in person that she was leaving, and had to instead tell her over video conference, her mother staring blankly into the camera while Meredith spoke, drinking something out of a coffee mug that was probably alcoholic.
"Don't let him hurt you," she'd said, and Meredith knew it was worthless to explain to her that he had to hurt her, that it was the only way she'd ever prove herself.
Because of all those loose ends, she'd only had two days to sit down with the Weyland computer files on LV-183, although she'd stayed up late each night, pouring over them, memorizing a random smattering of facts and details. LV-183 was actually a moon, terraformed about thirty years ago for the sole purpose of extracting a mineral required for the production of the hard drives found in all of Weyland Industries' robots. The average daily temperature hovered around minus ten degrees Celsius, and Meredith had spun through photographs of the moon's surface that all looked like Christmas cards, white snow and green cedars. She made sure to memorize the names of the miners, as many as she could, and read up on their backgrounds, their previous employers, their times spent with Weyland Industries.
None of this research prepared her.
She sat on the bridge of the ship as they descended. Captain Dorca gave her an easy smile when she asked if she could, said, "Sure, whatever you want," and then ignored her the rest of the way down. She was aware of David standing in the corner but did her best to ignore him. When the ship passed through the atmosphere everything in the window turned white, and she actually gasped out loud. Captain Dorca laughed and her cheeks flushed with embarrassment and she thought about David recording her gasp, preparing to send it back to her father.
She needed to be more careful.
The white continued all the way down. Meredith realized it was snow, swirling around the ship as they made their descent. Bits of ice formed on the glass, crawling across it in thin delicate lines. She curled her hands into fists, her heart pounding, and when she glanced over at Captain Dorca he was hunched over his controls, eyes fixed firmly ahead.
"Not long now," he muttered.
The ship jerked back and forth in the wind, but Meredith choked down her fear. Captain Dorca cursed. And then, slowly, like a woman peeling back a curtain, the snow swirled away, revealing a great expanse of glittering white ice. The mining station was a bright orange-red smudge against that white convas, like an abstract painting.
"Worst of it's up top," Captain Dorca said. "Once you get through that, the surface is usually calm."
"I see." Meredith could hardly breathe. She'd never seen so much snow.
"Are you ready to disembark?" David asked, startling her. She collected herself and nodded.
"You're gonna want to bundle up," Captain Dorca said, and he shut off the Antigone's engines.
Meredith left the bridge and went down to the holding bay, where her trunks of clothes lay waiting for her. She'd packed her coat and scarf and gloves on top, and she pulled them out of the trunk, smoothing down the wrinkles.
"Do you need assistance?"
Meredith steadied herself at the sound of David's voice. "No," she said, pulling on her coat. She turned around. He was wearing his own coat, his own gloves. "I'm fine."
"Once we're ready, I can take you to the station," David said. "We can send someone to fetch your things."
Meredith nodded. She wrapped her scarf over head, pulled on her gloves.
"Ready," she said.
Except she wasn't. When Captain Dorca released the holding bay doors, cold air blasted in with enough force that Meredith had to turn her face away. Her eyes watered. She thought about frostbite, her nose turning black and falling off.
She felt a hand on her arm.
"This way, Ms. Vickers," David said.
She was too stunned by the cold to shake him off. He led her out of the ship and into the snow. Her feet sank into it by a few centimeters. The air had a glint to it like light refracting off the edge of the knife, and the sky was the pearly color of the inside of a mollusk's shell.
David led her across the landscape. Her breath formed in white clouds in front of them and her body shivered the way it had when she woke from the cryochambers. Snow seeped in through her boots and turned her feet numb.
Meredith suspected her father sent her to this place in particular because she had grown up in a swamp. Because nothing, nothing, about LV-183 was familiar to her. It was as alien as if the atmosphere had never been transformed, and she had just as little right to be walking across its surface.
A miner was waiting for them at the station's entrance, smoking a cigarette and shivering beneath his coat. He squinted at Meredith through the snow's glare, his gaze moving up and down the length of her body, like he was trying to look through the layers of her clothes. She caught his eye and glared until he looked away.
"Welcome to LV-183," he said, still looking off to the side. He flicked his cigarette into the snow and it disappeared with a hiss.
"Thank you," she said, in the cold, measured tones she'd learned from her professors. "I look forward to working with you."
"I can show you the facility," David said, entering a code into the keypad beside the door. The door swished open. The miner ducked in without saying anything, and then she and David followed. The air inside was hot and dry, the cooridor empty. Meredith pulled off her scarf. She still felt disoriented, although she wasn't sure if it was from the snow or from the cryochamber or from David or from the fact that she had no idea what the fuck she was doing.
David took her to meet the mining crew a few hours later, after she'd had time to see her quarters (spacious, tastefully decorated, with a private bathroom and a kitchenette) and unpack her trunks. She changed into the grey Weyland suit and stared at herself in the mirror above her bathroom sink. Under normal circumstances she would have put on makeup, a bit of eyeshadow and lip gloss, but then she remembered the miner leering at her and so she set the eyeshadow brush back down on the counter. She thought about the day her father named her as heir - "This works better with a son, but I guess you'll do."
She left her face bare and pulled her hair back in a severe ponytail.
A chime shimmered through her quarters. "Come in!" she said, and the room responded, the doors sliding open with a soft whisper. When she stepped out of the bathroom David was waiting for her. He was dressed in an identical suit. For a moment they only stared at each other.
"The crew is ready to meet you, Ms. Vickers."
Yeah, I'm not ready to meet the crew. But she only said, "Very good," and then followed him out into the station's labyrinth of hallways. Her heart fluttered inside her chest and her palms were slick with sweat but she reminded herself that David was recording her, that he was going to send all this back to her father. She had to be wary.
The crew was waiting for her in the equipment room, almost a hundred of them all sprawled out on fold-up chairs, surrounded by a forest of machinery Meredith didn't even recognize, much less know how to operate. She could feel their eyes burning holes through her as she walked up to the front of the room. David handed her a microphone and slipped off to the side as if to join the rest of the machines. For a moment Meredith just stood there stupidly, gazing out those hard, weatherworn faces. She'd known faces like that when she was a little girl, knew what sort of people wore them: People who didn't take bullshit and didn't trust outsiders. She might've grown up to become one of them, actually, if her father hadn't swooped in and carried her away.
Any sort of in she might have had with these people was lost a long time ago. She took a deep breath.
"I know most of you don't know me," she said, and there was her first lie - she said most when she meant all. "My name is Meredith Vickers. I work for Weyland Industries." She gave a thin, tight-lipped smile, and despite her lack of makeup she still felt too pretty, too much like a daughter. "I'm sure you all think I'm here to represent the company's interests, but as you're all part of the company, I assure you I'm here to represent your interests as well."
She'd come up with that line in the shower after waking up from the cryochamber. She'd whispered it to herself as the hot water ran over her skin and thought the words had a nice to ring to them. She believed them, to an extent. She understood well enough that an effective manager always respects her employees.
But when she spoke that line into that microphone, in that strange cavernous room full of suspicious eyes, it felt tinny and faraway and distorted, some distant transmission lost in space years ago. The miners shifted in their seats, exchanged glances. Scowled.
Meredith glanced at David. He was staring at her - recording her. She wouldn't let him trick her into thinking he was just another computer gone into hibernation.
She pushed on.
"I look forward to working with all of you. I'm not here to do your job and I'm not here to interfere -"
"Horseshit," someone said, toward the back of the room, and Meredith closed her eyes for a second and ignored it.
"Weyland Industries prides itself in hiring the best," she said. "You're all the best. I won't interfere because there won't be any reason to."
No one said anyway. She gazed over the room, all those men and woman who didn't care if Weyland stayed on top of the synthetics industry, and who didn't have fathers to impress.
"Thank you for your time," Meredith said. "I'll let you get back to work. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask."
The miners all shuffled to their feet, voices rising in a chatter. When David took the microphone from Meredith, she smiled. It was not a smile for him but for the recording, for her father.
She'd come here, she'd taken the position. She hoped she'd passed the first test.
