[A giant plastic clothespin] The trade ship launched out of earth orbit, the twin Dragon rockets powering it out toward the moon, or at least where the moon would be when it got there. Everything about space navigation is trying to only barely miss moving target. This one took a particularly long time to reach its destination, coasting almost as much as it actually tried to move forward, using the barest blips of fuel as it moved from orbit to orbit. It took forever this way, but it was cheap. A quarter as much fuel needed, which meant that there was more room for actual cargo. Ray waited with everyone else from dome one, waiting to see who would go greet the visitors. A name was pulled out of a bag. Old-fashioned, even if the names were written on one of those reusable sheets of plastic instead of paper. "David Norester" He didn't look pleased at all. Ray wasn't surprised. The work of unloading a cargo was dangerous and boring, even if it was vital. Hence the lottery. They all put their names in, those that could, but almost nobody wanted to be picked. "Raylene Thurman" Four other names were called, but Ray had stopped listening. She sighed and went to change. The suits for outside the dome always chafed, and you'd sweat your entire water allotment if the suits didn't recycle it. The moon arrived at the same time the rocket did, as planned. It slipped, oh so carefully, into orbit around the moon. The payload detached, its slim rockets burning with barely a visible light, pushing gently against the attraction of the huge expanse of blank rock, until the awkward, egg-shaped structure settled onto the makeshift pad near the colony. Ray stood in the airlock, watching it settle. The everpresent dust scattered as its rockets got close, then there was an almost inaudible thud as the hulk landed with almost terrifying precision. Tiny in comparison, they scuttled about, looking a little like robots from the old movies, their bodies made to look mechanical by their suits, faces obscured by reflective gold plate. They moved closer, dragging the docking cables and cargo gantry along with them, bouncing even under the weight of them, every motion an exaggerated dance. They got ready to seal the gantry over the doorway, having decided long ago that it was easier to have real people do the work, rather than trying to design ever more sophisticated robotic clamps and locks to seal onto the hull of whatever craft came to make deliveries. Especially since you have to trust people and agree on things to make something work automatically, and trust was in short supply lately, and agreement even shorter. They watched the crew inside move about, obviously clumsy after two weeks of drifting under the barest of rocket power, now again weighing something, but a tenth of what they did back on Earth. Ray wondered if they had spent any time on the Station in orbit, or if they'd come straight up. The crew inside gave their signal, just a simple thumbs up, then mimed talking on a headset. Of course they wanted to talk first. Nobody could just take for granted that they'd done their job properly and get the doorway sealed. Ray sighed and carefully spelled out the frequency to use, signing each number slowly, her huge gloves feeling stiff and making her not quite sure she was being understood. The radio crackled, though, and she let it go. "Good to see you all. Hope you don't mind, we made a few changes since the last time the ship landed." The man's voice sounded tinny through the radio. "Of course you have." Ray said it out loud without actually thinking. She forgot that the lander wasn't one of the colonists. "The ESA has to change something every time. Do we need to fill out some form in triplicate, and request the form in writing for the next shipment?" "About that." The man's voice was almost a drawl, not the clipped speech that the ESA taught as Standard English. He stepped aside and pointed to a repainted flag on the wall behind him. It wasn't the bland ESA logo, it was the blue and green flag of Cascadia.