[a poem: "Heart Poem" by Mary Oliver]

The black comm unit feeped quietly on the desk. Not the shrill alert of an
actual call, but just the quiet message chirp of a not so important message.

Still, it broke Ray's concentration, and she glared at it for a moment
before tapping a button, sending the notice away without reading it, again.
She took a deep breath and a sip of her tea and focused back on her
terminal. 

Pages of information went past, faster than she could read, not that she was
trying to read all of it. She was just skimming for patterns. Something
stood out and she tapped the pause key and paged back. 

That one was nothing. Just the nightly alerts being sent, momentarily
breaking from the normal communication pattern. She tapped the pause key
again and the rush of information followed. 

She supposed she could write a piece of software to filter out the noise,
but she habitually scanned the logs herself looking for patterns, since she
wasn't sure what she was looking for. She's just notice it when she saw it.
She hoped.

Someone was sending information out of the colony. That itself wasn't a
problem, but the last transport shuttle had arrived from earth orbit with a
couple uninvited guests, two United Nations Security Council spooks, and
they started asking questions that seemed awfully suspicious. 

Nobody on the Moon liked the spooks.

Technically, the colony was a United Nations protected project, one of those
feel-good "for the good of all nations" projects that the higher-ups loved
to pat themselves on the back for, but the reality was far different. The
first moon base had been built by the Americans, and then abandoned during
their second civil war. Then the ESA had sent up two domes, not more than a
couple years after Europe had taken over the UN, and kicked what was left of
the United States out of the security council.

Then the first colonists were all volunteers. The ESA thought that they
probably wouldn't be coming back, if they survived at all, so it went to the
first group that could get itself organized to go, a bunch of rag-tag
engineers and scientists from the old United States, and a few scientists
from Africa who'd given up trying to do work on another war-ravaged
continent.

The ESA didn't trust the colonists at all, and the feeling was mutual.

Ray scanned over the logs again. Lots of personal communication, but it was
the kind that was so bland that you'd go crazy trying to find something
hidden in it. Nothing stuck out. But she was sure that someone was sending
all kinds of juicy tidbits back to Earth, letting those UN spooks ask their
creepy questions.

-----

Dome one's dining hall was communal. It was easier not to waste food if
everyone ate together, so they'd decided to do it that way. Ray bounded in
and took a tray and waited to see what the menu held. It was probably gross.
Almost everything was gross. They'd finally had a little luck in getting
vat-meat to grow properly in low gravity, but even the firmest pieces were
kind of like eating a pork flavored sponge. And other than that, it was
whatever Bio had managed to grow in the past few cycles. Lots of algae, and
by the looks of it, that was all they'd managed this time around. Soup
again, the bland green goop that filled bellies well enough but never
satisfied.

She took her tray and the oversized bowl of slop and found the quietest
corner of the hall to eat.

She took a little tin out of her pocket and took a pinch of the red powder
it held and sprinkled it gingerly into the bowl.

She took a sip. Good enough.

She'd spent her entire water allotment on an experiment to grow peppers. An
acquaintance had snuck a few seeds into a gift sent up on the last shuttle, and
she'd snuck some dirt out of Bio without anyone noticing. They ended up being
almost vines, standing up tall in the low gravity, and the normally long fruits
turned instead into round blobs.

She'd skipped her showers all but once a week, and even then, the ration was
hardly enough.  It had paid off, though. A half dozen ripe, red peppers had
hung from the vines, and she had plucked them in the prime and had dried them
in the vacuum in the lab, saving just a few of the choicest seeds for another
attempt later on, and crushed them into the fine powder she now kept in the
little plastic canister in the pack she carried around her waist.

She tried not to be secretive as she sprinkled it into her food, but the
clandestine attempt at culinary correction was notable in any case. She just
hoped nobody noticed.