Mostly, it was the little things that unsettled her.
The length of the days, to start with. The sun stayed up longer than she would’ve liked, burning a hole through the gauzey atmosphere as the shadows of their base camp tapered thinner and thinner. Colors were weird here, too- either it was the colors, or the way the light was filtering them. The air was dry and hazy like chalkdust, which made her throat feel sore; that, actually, might’ve been an after-effect of the cryosleep. She hadn’t listened to all the symptoms rattled off by the mild-mannered paramedic, choosing to believe that her previous cryotraining made her immune- which was not the case, as it turned out. That first day had consisted mostly of puking.
The silence was the worst. The windless calm. Her time on Neos, Erebus, Khola, even Meridian, had left her accustomed to nothing but constant sound and sensation; she felt at home in places that were lurid and loud, overcrowded with human life. Even on long, solo cargo flights, there’d always been the drone of the ship and chatter on the radio to keep her company. But this was something else entirely. Confronted by this silence, from the moment the Equinox had docked on the planet’s surface, Mirren had felt a rumor of unease deep in the pit of her stomach- a feeling she had yet to shake, twelve days later.
This was their first night beyond the protective enclosure of the Equinox. Without the familiar hum or the distant creaks of metal, sure enough, she couldn’t sleep for shit. Woke disoriented in the semi-dark, desperate to burn off whatever shapeless dream she’d just been having, and reached for her tablet to fire up one of those mindless, unbeatable holo-games with a thousand-and-one levels. It did the trick for a little while. Her eyes darted around, tracking the flash of forty different colors as her fingers expertly stabbed at the projection - good for her reflexes, which she figured justified the actual money she’d paid to unlock even more of these pointless levels. But then the tablet flickered, and went dark.
Which is how Mirren came to be in one of the equipment tents, crouched down besides a rumbling solar inverter, squinting at the wires snaking into it. They coiled together and formed a loose bundle at the base; probably shouldn’t be touching these, she thought to herself, and began yanking out plugs indiscriminately. The charging cable didn’t seem compatible with any of the ports that she tried to force it into. “Oh, fuck me, with this fuckin’ shet.”
