Tempest Outpost by Brad harmer-barnes

Author:Brad harmer-barnes [harmer-barnes, Brad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severed Press
Published: 2017-10-21T23:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

After the breakfast meeting, Captain Anna sat with her head in her hands. She had expected the vote to be a total landslide. Surely none of them could want more spiders running around. She thought that Cameron – for sure – would want to use the Prospero again, but that thing was his baby. He’d fire it up and play with it every day if he could. Both Betty and Roger had been in favour of another drilling, and they were the opposite of Cameron in terms of motivation. Another drilling meant more work for them, and they would normally do anything for an easy life.

Kurt hadn’t been so much of a surprise. He wanted more samples to play with. And Claire obviously hadn’t changed her mind from the previous day. So that had left just her, Jazmin and Bobby voting against another drilling. So, the next morning, the Prospero would once again go spinning down into the ocean to bring up god knows what sea monsters lay below.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up to see Jazmin. “You okay?”

“No, not really. I’m sure it’ll be fine, though. I just…I didn’t expect this when I accepted the job, you know? Fossils, sure. Rocks that look normal to us but are somehow endlessly fascinating to Kurt and Bobby and Cameron – and, I guess, you – absolutely. Hell, maybe even oil, should we be so lucky. I didn’t expect monstrous undead spiders.”

Jazmin slid into a seat next to her. “We’re out on the frontier here. We shouldn’t know what to expect.”

“Yeah, I know. I just…I guess I expected the discoveries to be boring. And actually they’re terrifying. And now things are getting weirder. I honestly didn’t think Betty and Roger would want to go drilling. For them, the longer that goes between drillings then the happier they are. They only really have work to do every time we fire it up. Don’t get me wrong, when there’s work that needs doing, they do it and they do it well and they do a thorough job; but all the same, they’d rather there was no work to do and they could sit on their backsides listening to music and watching movies.”

“Does Betty seem to be acting unusual to you?”

“How do you mean?”

Jazmin nervously played with her fingers. “She, uh, came by my room last night. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it was friendly, and kind of flattering, but it was just…I don’t think she’d said more than twenty words to me before now.”

“I see. What did she want?”

“I dunno. She made it sound like we could just hang out and watch movies, but there was definitely an undertone of something else there, if you follow me.”

Anna shrugged and took a sip of coffee. “Maybe she likes you.”

“Claire seems strange, too.”

“That she does.”

“The other day she was practically climbing the walls because she was so scared of the tarantulas running around. Now, she’s the one pushing the lead to light up the Prospero and potentially bring up a whole damned horde of the things.

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