DATE: Year 487-A, Sol 9
LOCATION: Kazo Colony, Ganymede
Talcott Poe was surprised he was able to get to Ganymede after the bombing.
His employers had arranged an escape shuttle to one of the outer launch pads of the Hotel Florida dome, and he managed to make it there just before everything got shut down.
His was one of the last shuttles to depart Europa. It was headed for a different moon of Jupiter, but Poe had arranged ahead of time for a separate flight from there to Ganymede, to visit his child.
The mother, Hacta Halsey, worked for the Broads, who had hired her while she was pregnant. She stayed on their compound outside of Kazo Colony half the week, or four days. Poe didn’t like it. He knew better than to advise her against it, instead trying to get a job at the Broad compound as well. He’d been brought in to test for a guard position but was rejected.
Shortly after the child was born, Poe was picked up while collecting hydrated salt minerals outside the dome and charged with unauthorized resource extraction. The minerals were useful in energy storage tech, and the JLF rarely monitored its collection because demand was virtually unlimited but the collection itself was arduous and in the end not very profitable.
That was how Poe ended up in the mines. He suspected the Broads of calling a favor in with the JLF but never told Halsey that either. He knew he was lucky to have met her. Her family were among the founders of Kazo Colony, which didn’t mean what it used to, but did mean access to their portion of the colony’s housing stock.
They had a small cubby at the outskirts of her family’s holdings, and it was accessible from the public thruways within the colony, so Poe never had to interact with any other Halsey family member, though many of them didn’t interact with each other either.
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Poe didn’t expect Hacla to be at their home when he arrived. She usually worked the first half of the week.
-Is the child okay? Poe asked. She was only three years old and so hadn’t been named yet. Hundreds of years earlier humans stopped naming their children until their fourth or fifth birthday, to wait to see if they survived that long first.
-She’s sleeping, Hacla responded, turning away from Poe. I thought you were dead. The bombing.
-No, Poe said simply, taking a few steps closer to the bench where she’d been sitting.
-The Broad son died in it, she continued. And they fired me.
-What’s one have to do with the other?
-They’d already spent the money promised to them for the son. What happened on Europa?
Poe stared at her.
-It wasn’t supposed to blow up that much.
-Is that how explosions work?
-I don’t know Hacta.
-Are you ok?
-I want to see the child.
Hacla stood up quietly and took Poe by the hand, walking with him to the alcove where the child slept.
-What future does she have? Poe asked mournfully.
-This one, Hacla said neutrally, looking around their environ, the cubby where her father raised her until she died, and where she expected to do the same with the child. It was what it was.
Just then the proximity alarm went off. There’d been a breach of the Halsey estate.
-Under authority! Under authority!
The yells from down the hall meant these were some kind of authorized intruders, or intruders who held some kind of certificate from one of the charters presuming to grant them the right to conduct a kinetic operation.
Poe knew whoever it was was coming for him. Maybe he’d been sold out after all.
-I blew the hotel up, he murmured to Hacta, who hadn’t registered the noises from the hall yet.
-What?
-I set the explosives up. It was only supposed to take out the landing pad.
-They said the dragons did it.
The intruders never identified themselves before shooting a projectile through the side of Poe’s head, killing him instantly.
The sound of the shooting was loud, but neither that nor Poe’s body falling to the gound nor Hacta’s impossibly high-pitched scream woke the child up.
