[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.