Free Vyyda Book 1: The Haver Problem by Kevin Bliss

the staff at HSPB-Luna.  Explaining the lie would come later, after the landing and discovery of what had triggered something so extreme as a lockdown.
                  For several minutes, the new approach didn’t bring any better results than the first.  Then, shortly after the third (and increasingly urgent) version of the emergency transmission, clearance came.  They were to land and remain in their skip until medical personnel arrived.
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    5.
    From Islington
     
    There was no way Dorsey could have put Tomas Witt off forever.  And, now that he'd been cornered and coerced, little point to delaying the task given him.  He was only halfway to his quarters when an alert sounded on his fleks , the narrow, tresanium-laced coil worn around his wrist, alerting him to Witt’s deposit of the FTC-45 documents in his personal comms line.
    Dorsey’s living space amounted to less than half of what Tomas Witt and other senior faculty members enjoyed.  Not that it bothered him.  What he had was comfortable enough.
    The small sliver of a kitchen, plain-looking table (which doubled as a desk) and reasonably comfortable bed were all together in a single-room set up.  Only the lav had been separated from what could easily be seen upon entering the residence.
    Ether-screens could be triggered in two places:  above the table or before the foot of the bed.  Dorsey chose the former on his way to the pair of cupboards that contained provisions.  The screen still held the triple-panel image of an Earth tree (of particular fascination to Dorsey) in various stages of growth.  It was a somewhat common image that had been reproduced countless times through U-Space, passed along and treasured by many.  Not only did it represent the life that could grow from a piece of ground when proper elements existed, but it also demonstrated how something so small could become extraordinarily large (from a U-Spacer’s point of view) on the home planet.  It was Dorsey's default screen, and had been for years, one situation after another – from Hyland forward.
    The image was one of the few personal touches to be found in the quarters.  Not only had there been little in Dorsey's travels to which he'd become attached, there was also the question of practicality.  Some items just made for tough moves.  However, through the entire path he'd followed, from Hyland to Sykes, there was a trio possessions Dorsey had managed to keep close:
    The first was a thermometer of the sort carried by cargo joks on the molkas where they spent interminable hours.  Dorsey hated the cold and had attempted to use the thermometer he’d gotten (during a brief tenure working laundry on a molka) to convince Pietro Sklar to raise the temperature in the sector of residences where his rooms were located (to no avail).
    He kept a narrow, ten centimeter whistle constructed of some cheap metal beside the thermometer.  It featured four holes that he’d been taught to cover in various combinations with his fingers as he blew through the mouthpiece.  He’d been told it was of Earth, but never believed the tale.  It looked too new and the material from which it had been crafted resembled closely many other cheap items fashioned from the available resources in U-Space.  Nevertheless, it made an interesting sound and he had spent hours simply blowing notes – never coming up with anything approaching a pleasing composition – instead of listening to the artif icially created music piped in to residences.
    Finally, hidden away in his lav, Dorsey possessed a small globe with what purported to be the lines of land and ocean on Earth.  It was made of a composite common in U-Space manufacturing and had been painted to reflect the blue o f water and tan of land masses (as suggested by the occasional maps of Earth bouncing around U-Space).  The colors had chipped away in certain spots, but it sat atop the sink squeezed between his commode and