There were eight of us assigned to the station when the greenies brought her in half-dad with fear and cold, turned her over to Alice--our station--and left on their lizardy business.
Poor Alice hadn't been trained to be a nursemaid for an abandoned kid so all she did was get her in bed, heat up the chamber a few degrees, and send out a call on the distress band for us to hurry-hurry home.
Hurry-hurry was just one thing we couldn't do. The seven of us were working deep that day--down to about twenty atmospheres--and decompression back to station levels takes time, even for us modifieds.
Needless to say we were all roundly cursing the greenies the whole time we guided our scaphs back to the transport and stowed them in the recesses along each side of the monster ship. The stupid lizards, leaving some poor human child to the mercies of Alice. What a stupid stunt... "Damn them," we cried as we sweated the transport up through the heavy atmosphere of the giant planet Grimm.
It was our own fault in a way, leaving the station alone. But what ever happens out her that requires a human attendant to stay behind? Certainly a space station orbiting an our of the way place such as Grimm wasn't likely to have many visitors, aside from the regularly scheduled traders that worked this sector.
Usually Jack, our normal, would have been at the station since he couldn't get down to pressure like the rest of us. But right now Jack was on his way home with our last load of pyrads for the Federation markets and orders to fill for the station; food, of course, fuel, repair supplies and, most important to our sanity, whatever was new in the medical field.
As were most modifieds, we miners were all avowed hypochondriacs. We needed the constant reassurance of having a large amount of medical machinery right at our fingertips. They tell me it has to do with the trauma of modification--when your brain wakes up to find that they've changed things around since its last check. How would you like to wake up and find your feet right there, three feet from your nose?
)
Even a poor orphan can do a lot for seven lonely men mining a distant and distinctly dangerous planet.
