"This tea tastes horrible," Meadow complained, setting aside her cup after only two sips.
"You're right, it is," Sage agreed, putting her own cup down even though she had drunk more than half of it and previously declared it to be 'just the thing I needed'. Not that Selene was surprised, Sage had always been an ardent follower who would chop and change her mind depending on the opinion of others and once again, Selene found herself wondering why she had never really noticed it before. How had she continued to think that they were good people?
"Maybe we should just be grateful that we're here at all and that we're not locked up somewhere," she suggested, defiantly draining her own cup of weak, milky machine-made tea, even though she didn't like tea. It was warm, it was wet and it was better than nothing after the shock they had all had. At least, that was how she saw it.
"Sandwich isn't much better," Cosmo added, savagely biting off the corner of his cheese and tomato as if he had been expecting tea at the Ritz. "And why are they treating us like we're children that need babysitting?"
"Maybe because we arrived unannounced, without permission, with the intent to protest and stop their operations?" Selene suggested breezily. The guard outside the room snorted in amusement, which for some reason she found heartening.
"This isn't the end," Meadow insisted, pushing aside her untouched meal of cardboard-tasting sandwich and stale potato chips as if it were poisoned. "As soon as we get back to Earth we can see about arranging passage again."
Selene sighed, rolling her eyes so hard it hurt. "No, we won't."
Cosmo shot a glare her way. "You don't get a say in this."
"You're well in with those International Rescue guys so your opinion doesn't count," Meadow added, siding with Cosmo as Selene knew she would.
"You should never have called them," Cosmo continued to complain, slurping his tea bitterly.
"Oh yeah? And just how would we have landed?" Selene demanded to know, crossing her arms to suppress the urge to reach over and throttle him.
"We would have figured something out," Cosmo said, waving his hand dismissively. "Now we have them butting into our business and causing trouble."
"Yeah, they should have stayed away," Sage chimed in, completing the lineup of backstabbing while Atlas simply stared at her, a nasty smile on his face.
You're nothing but her yappy dog, Selene thought, shaking her head in disgust. Blindly following her lead, unable to think for yourself. That was the hardest part. She'd spent so long believing that they were doing good, that they were radical free thinkers trying to right the wrongs of a society that they didn't feel they belonged in when, in reality, they were nothing but idiots playing a dangerous game they had no hope of winning. That didn't mean that she agreed with the government and their exploitation of the moon's resources, nor did she plan on giving up her fight, but she knew this wasn't the way to do it. She should have listened to Genevieve's warning.
Selene looked over at Rain, hoping to find at least one friendly face but the other girl, exhausted by the whole ordeal, was fast asleep on the table, her head pillowed on her folded arms.
Unable to sit still any longer she got up under the pretence of taking her cup to the recycling chute, but when she returned she made sure to seat herself at the opposite end of the table, physically separating herself from the group as much as she had mentally removed herself from the equation. She dropped her head into her hands, fingers massaging her temples as she tried to fight off the stress headache blooming into life.
She was tired, she was pissed off and their ungrateful, warped reality attitudes were making it so much worse. She wanted to scream at them, to tear strips off them as she usually would, but found herself unable to summon the energy. All she wanted to do was go home and get herself as far away from them as possible.
"Hey," a soft voice said close to her left, interrupting her contemplation of the inside of her eyelids as John pulled out a chair and settled next to her. "Are you okay?"
Selene nodded, not trusting herself to speak as Scott joined them, taking the seat to her right and sliding a cup of coffee and another sad-looking sandwich towards John.
"How's the pilot doing?" she asked, hating the way that the rest of the group were studiously ignoring the two men who had so recently saved their lives.
"He's doing well," Scott answered, biting into his own sandwich and chewing determinedly. "He's still showing no signs of illness, all tests for anything contagious have shown as negative, so they have no idea why he collapsed as he seems perfectly fine." He paused to stuff another big bite into his mouth as if he were used to eating on the go. "But they want to monitor him for a little longer before they release him."
"So we'll be going soon?" Meadow asked, not bothering with pleasantries.
John nodded as he sipped his coffee, making a face at the taste. "We're just waiting for the go-ahead to take off once a clear route has been approved. Then, as long as the pilot is given the all-clear, we'll get you all boarded within half an hour, so make the most of being able to walk around because you won't be able to onboard our ship."
Cosmo barely glanced up from his sandwich as he said, "Thanks, I guess."
"You guess?" Selene snarled out, seeing red. They could say what they wanted to her, but she would not stand by and let them be so damned rude to John and Scott. "When we get back, don't bother to call."
Meadow laughed, a nasty, cruel sound that took Selene by surprise. "We wouldn't call if you were the last person on Earth. We value loyalty in this group."
Scott exchanged a look with John who lifted an eyebrow in return. Scott nodded and got to his feet, dropping a solid-feeling hand onto her shoulder. "Come with us to check on the pilot?"
"No need to ask me twice." Selene pushed back her chair, the resulting screech sounding like a statement even to her ears. "I can't stand the hypocrisy in this room, I might choke on it."
-x-
Scott leaned against the door of the little medical centre, trying to stay out of the way as the doctor and his nurse finished up their last checks on their less-than-impressed patient.
"I tell you I feel fine," the pilot insisted. "Better than fine actually."
"Then do you mind if we ask you a few questions before we leave?"
"Might as well," the pilot agreed, more for something to take his mind off the fact that the nurse was removing the IV line she had inserted and it made him a little woozy to look at it.
"Did you not notice anything wrong with the ship before you left?" John asked from his spot beside the window, having insisted that Selene take the only visitor's chair the room had to offer.
The pilot sighed. "Look here, buddy, I don't know any of these people or anything about the ship. I was hired to do the job and that's what I did. Yeah, the ship wasn't modern or up to my usual standards, but I'll be honest with you, times are a little hard right now and I'm in no position to be picky." He looked down at his feet, embarrassed to be admitting such personal circumstances to virtual strangers. "Jobs have been drying up since I left the freighter fleet, my wife didn't like the long journeys, you see, what with having kids at home. So when the company I was with folded, I promised her short jobs only."
"So you've been under a lot of stress lately?" the doctor asked, listening in.
"No more than anyone else," the pilot said dismissively. "I felt fine before the trip, nothing different than usual or I wouldn't have taken off. I'm not incompetent, I know my limits and the limits of space. I was with ESA for a few years, did my training with them and got my space rating back in the days before they did on the job training that's not worth the paper it's printed on, so I know what I'm doing."
"No one was implying that you didn't," Scott assured him. "Go on."
The pilot shrugged. "There's not much else to tell. I turned up, got in the ship that had been provided, as I always do as a pilot for hire, and started her up. She took off alright, a bit rattly but nothing to worry about, and once we cleared the atmosphere I was so focused on flying and trying to stay on course, you've seen the state of the navigation system-"
"Or lack thereof," John muttered.
The pilot winced in sympathy for navigators everywhere.
"What happened next?" Scott pushed.
The pilot thought about it for a few moments, his face creased with concentration as he tried to remember. "I think I heard someone come up behind me, but the cabin door was broken and didn't close, so I figured one of them had wandered up to see what was going on. Didn't bother me none, I was being paid to ferry a bunch of do-gooders with too much money around-" he trailed off, realising that Selene was in the room with them. He gave her a small smile before rushing on, "No offence love, you seem like the sensible type."
"None taken," she assured him, speaking for the first time. And she was telling the truth, she wasn't offended in the slightest. Cosmo and Meadow came from affluent backgrounds, the type with more money than sense. They had met at university, where they had picked up Sage and Rain, adopted their New Age monikers and joined the environmental club that Selene, the only one to not attend their university, had joined a few years later after being introduced to Genevieve, one of the founders, through a mutual friend at Stonehenge. Genevieve and some of the others had warned her that Cosmo's group could be a little extreme, but they had seemed fine to her, maybe a little too inclined to believe that money fixed everything, while not understanding that the same money they were splashing around to play weekend activist was the motivation for the things they were protesting against.
Instead of being sensible and building up support for their causes, they seemed to favour the more radical route, believing that the bank of Mum and Dad, as well as their influence, could get them out of any trouble they got themselves into. And, for the most part, they had been right. They had been arrested more times than Selene could count but always got let off with a slap on the wrist and the authorities receiving a generous 'donation' to their Christmas party fund. Selene on the other hand, had to be more careful. She didn't mind speaking up and being counted when it mattered, she had no qualms with standing her ground and making a point when it was needed and had been involved with a number of organised protest events over the years, but this time they had gone too far and it had shocked her to her core.
"So, I figured that if they wanted to come sit up front with me and watch the stars go by, who was I to stop them?" the pilot continued, unaware of the inner turmoil her thoughts were in. "I turned to face whoever was there but I must have moved too quickly, my blood pressures not what it once was, and gotten a little dizzy as that's all I can remember. I must have blacked out as the next thing I know I'm coming round with a bunch of faces staring at me and a blanket over my lap. I felt tired, so tired, like I was in the middle of a bad bout of flu. I could barely keep my eyes open and, after a moment or two, I just let it happen. I must have fallen asleep again as after that I was woken up and told we were getting off the freighter and into your rocket. But then I felt on top of the world, as if I'd slept for a week in a feather bed," he finished.
"Have you ever passed out like that before?" the doctor asked.
He shook his head. "Nope, never, not even in my younger days in the RAF before I joined ESA."
"And you've not been unwell lately? You mentioned your blood pressure?" the doctors continued to quiz as the nurse checked his blood pressure again, finding the reading to be normal.
"The wife noticed I've been carrying a little extra weight lately," the pilot admitted, patting his stomach ruefully. "And probably not doing enough exercise, so she made me go to my doctor. But I've got pills for it now and I'm eating better, when the wife is there, that is."
The doctor looked up from studying the printed test results, glanced at Scott and shook his head, he couldn't find anything else to explain the man's fainting episode.
"Could there have been an issue with the airflow in the cabin or the pressurisation?" John asked the pilot, racking his brain for anything that could have caused such a reaction.
"All seemed to be sound, I wouldn't have taken off if the systems hadn't shown green. I'm telling ya I don't know what happened."
Realising that their back and forth was getting them nowhere, Scott asked, "Doctor, is he cleared to fly?"
"Well, we can't find anything wrong, so as long as he feels fit enough to walk, could evacuate the capsule by himself if needed, and won't be left alone during the flight, certainly."
"I feel fit as a fiddle," the pilot confirmed, proving his point by swinging his legs down off the bed and standing up without so much as a wobble.
The doctor watched him carefully and, after directing him to sit down, stand up and walk the room a few times, checked his blood pressure again. "Everything looks fine. You're cleared to fly."
"Thanks, Doc," the pilot said, holding out his hand for the man to shake. "And thanks to you too, nurse."
Scott straightened from his relaxed lean, all business now. "Right, let's go pick up those guys so we can get out of here."