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Sani gave one or two more half-hearted dabs at her sticky pubic hair with the well-used wipe before sighing and giving it up. With a quick twist, she placed her feet against the bulkhead and soared through the hatchway herself, easily grabbing a handhold on the other side to come to a stop. Ravi already had the bottom half of his pressure suit on and was carefully positioning the top of the suit above his head so that he could try to ease into it.

Without waiting to be asked, Sanira pushed herself over and took position above the suit, placing her hands atop the helmet and bracing her back against the bulkhead above. Ravi flashed a quick smile up at her through the torso of the suit and it's clear helmet then snaked his shoulders and chest upwards, using her helpful resistance to quickly push himself straight in, rather than having to slowly work into the suit.

"Thanks" he said, his voice muffled as the two halves of the suit came together with a rippling "clack".

Sanira gave him a nod, then soared to the far end of the module and tucked the used wipe into the disposal slot in the left door of the 'fresher. She floated there for a moment, thinking longingly of turning the unit back on and getting another warm, moist wipe to clean herself again, but finally she just reached down to the open drawer at the bottom of the cabinet and pulled out her clean body stocking. The cabinet gave what sounded like a satisfied "beep" that she had finally come back to retrieve her garment, then the drawer clicked shut and the 'fresher doors slowly closed on their own.

The sanitised fibers of the stocking felt good against her skin as Sanira tugged it up her legs and ducked into the shoulders. She ran her finger up the sealstrip until the closure ran right up under her chin, then turned to see Ravi floating there by the airlock, a big grin visible through the blur of the holographic instruments projected on the inside of his helmet.

"You rascal!" she laughed, shaking a mock fist at him. "Sitting there getting an eyeful while I dress, you should be ashamed!"

Ravi slapped the control button for the airlock, quickly pulling himself in. It began to close automatically as soon as he was inside.

"Sorry Sani" he said, his suit radio being pushed through internal speakers in the work module. "It's hard to resist looking at something so enticing" he paused. "And thanks for the delicious breakfast!" His mic cut off, but not before she heard one or two peals of his boyish laughter.

With that, the outer door of the lock clunked open and Ravi pulled himself out. Sanira shook her head, smiling. There was no doubt about it, Ravi was much more cheeky and happy when she took the time to play with him a little bit. No doubt some day he would have a nice wife to give him a little attention when he started to drag; until then Sanira would take care of the duty when needed.

The job of taking care of her work partner out of the way, Sanira turned her attention to the long list of tasks she needed to complete before she could grab a bite of food and crawl into her sleep bag for some rest. Deciding to get started right away, she floated over to the exercise station in the equipment module and spoke the command for the treadmill to deploy. After a moment, the treadmill unit locked into place, shoulder straps and breathing mask slowly floating upwards from their open compartments.

Sanira slid the heavy padded straps over her shoulders, feeling them automatically take up slack until her feet pressed firmly against the nubbed surface of the treadmill. Next she placed the breathing mask over her nose and mouth, pulling the soft flexible retaining strap tight around her head of close-cropped black hair. The treadmill started slowly, then gradually increased speed as Sanira warmed up. The straps provided resistance to keep her in place on the treadmill, but also simulated gravity to some degree, placing a load on her body similar to what she would feel back home on Duniya. The mask measured her respiration, while sensors monitored her pulse, circulatory system and perspiration, automatically maintaining a good pace.

Not that Sanira, or any other member of the space program that spent a lot of time in a suit was in bad shape; indeed, spending hours in a bulky suit that resisted your every movement created surprising strength and flexibility. But long experience had shown that in the absence of gravity, or at least simulated gravity from centrifugal force, people quickly lost bone density and suffered a host of other problems. Exercising against resistance bands would not wholly stop the process, but it would slow it enough that workers could mostly recover by rotating to a post with some sort of gravity for a few months.

Once she settled into her pace, Sanira started the rest of her work. "Assistant on" she commanded, causing the nearby holoprojector to come to life. A pair of screens projected crisply into the air in front of her, automatically rising and falling to stay aligned with her eyes as she jogged along on the treadmill. The right-hand screen displayed a list of scheduled tasks and the amount of time available to tackle them, including their primary task, which was maintaining and directing teams of work drones in their sector on the asteroid. Sanira ran through the list critically, making quick gestures to highlight a couple and adjust their priority. She also gave a verbal command to verify that the air filters were scheduled to be replaced. The system showed that the job was already on the list of maintenance items for them to complete right before the end of their rotation in three weeks.

Three weeks! Time was really flying. With that, Sanira shifted her focus to the left-hand screen, which displayed higher-level operational data. Theirs was one of seven work teams scattered about the lumpy, misshapen surface of the asteroid Chilae, which had been moved into high orbit above the red planet Manigal to be mined for resources by hundreds of drones. Much of the minutiae of managing the drones was handled by a sophisticated virtual intelligence housed at project headquarters on Tarak station, but the VI was not perfect.

Sanira carefully review the current deployment of the drone teams and input several adjustments to account for the changing composition they had were encountered as they chewed through the asteroid. Managing the teams was a mix of science, experience and an almost-artistic understanding of how all of the systems worked together to find, mine, sift, sort and process the asteroid's bulk into useable resources. Most of the crews on Tarak station knew that Sanira was one of the best at running a work module and its attendant drones and if they didn't know it was because they weren't paying attention.

Sani finished analyzing the latest data and input one or two last changes to the work plan for the drones, then closed her eyes for a moment to clear her head. A glance at the timer for her workout showed that she had another twenty minutes to go, so Sanira spoke a command to have her left screen display recent results from the other work modules, as they collectively chewed away at the asteroid.

The task of moving Chilae to the required location had begun when Sanira was still in diapers; swarms of small robots, supervised by only a handful of human monitors, set up solar-powered mass impellers all over one side of the asteroid, flinging small quantities of Chilae's own matter into space in a carefully-orchestrated operation to shift its obit down-system, towards the fourth planet.

By the time Sanira was in secondary school Chilae and a second, rockier asteroid named Likal were both in orbit above Manigal and work modules were in place with crews rotating through shifts to begin harvesting them. Precious metals and strategic minerals were collected and fired towards orbit above the homeworld, Duniya, while water, hydrogen and the less-valuable metals and minerals were stockpiled in low orbit above Manigal, part of a long-term plan to eventually transform the dry red world into a second home for humanity.

The vast wealth available to be harvested and sent home attracted some of the most powerful Sakharan families, while the prestige and far-reaching objective of transforming Manigal attracted others. The making of a whole new world was expected to provide opportunities for families to rise greatly in importance and wealth. At the same time, the plan would eventually provide a new cradle for civilization, which was itself a very important objective; the tense political situation on Duniya made the provision of a second home for humanity very urgent.

As the treadmill began to slow into cooldown mode, Sanira started one last runthrough of their work plan. She felt good about the remaining tasks that were on the schedule; as long as she and Ravi were efficient with their time they should be able to complete everything with no problems. A quick glance back to the right-hand monitor reassured her on that front; as usual Ravi was flying through the high-priority tasks outside with impressive speed.

Ravi had already checked on the overheating units on the Z team and concluded that their radiator vanes were getting choked with a heavy dust, which kept them from dumping heat into space as effectively as they could. Two of the always-busy maintenance drones were queued to run through the Z team, knocking loose the accumulated grit from radiator vanes with their multi-tools and then blasting them clean with shots of pressurized gas.

He had already moved on to a problem with one of the massive borer units that was attacking a nearby vein of heavy metals and rocky material. The unit kept shutting itself down every few minutes, running it's startup routine and then resuming work for a while, then randomly deciding to shut down and repeat the whole process again. It responded to to all of the VI's attempts to diagnose the issue with a message that basically equated to "Problem? What problem?"

Sanira had started to take a shot at the borer herself at the end of her shift but had run out of time. Now she smiled as the tiny red icon of the borer turned green on her display; Ravi had arrived, squeezed into the maintenance port on the backside of the massive machine to disconnect the central processor from all power for minute, then re-connected it. It wasn't a sure fix, but Ravi had an uncanny sense for what might work with their drones. It looked like that did the trick, because the borer was still happily chewing away at Chilae when Ravi left after observing it for ten minutes.

Sanira knew that his greater reach and physical strength helped Ravi, but it was really his energy and his remarkable ability to quickly solve problems that made him more effective working outside than she was. While Sanira might spend half an hour figuring out the exact problem and fixing it, Ravi would often observe the situation, then immediately execute a possible fix that only took a minute or two, then be on to the next problem before Sanira would even finish diagnosing the first. Yet another reason that he was a good work partner.

Finally the treadmill rumbled to a halt and the straps slackened so that Sanira could work her shoulders free. With her already tired from her shift outside, not to mention her playtime with Ravi, the hour-long workout left her feeling absolutely drained. As the exercise equipment slowly stowed itself away, Sanira pushed off and sailed back into the hab module.

She grabbed the container of santra juice from where it floated near one of the air returns, then floated over to her sleep bag. Tucking one arm through a strap of the bag, Sanira sipped the rest of the beverage, making a little face; Ravi loved santra juice but she found it too sweet. The juice finished, Sanira aimed carefully and then tossed the empty container towards the small square opening of the disposal unit, smiling to herself as it flew smoothly into it. The disposal unit rumbled quietly for a moment as it sorted the container into the proper disposal pod and compressed it down.

Sanira hung quietly for a moment, running through the last few things on her list and deciding that the rest could wait until after she had slept. With an easy twist she slid her legs into the sleep bag, then tugged the closure up to mid-chest height and shimmied until her side was to the bulkhead and brought her knees up a little. Comfortably curled up, she plucked a pair of earbuds from an inner pocket of the sleep bag and placed them in her ears, then closed her eyes and tried to relax.

Like most crew in the space program, Sanira already had a university degree and was completing advanced studies during her work rotation. Something about spending time working on a subject mostly unrelated to her daily work helped keep Sanira fresh and she truly enjoyed history, so it made sense to work on her Masters in history, with a focus on the rise of the Lesser States. Her current courses included several elements of pre-recorded instruction that she found helped her to sleep and at the same time she found that she often remembered the information; she cued the current module to play as she snuggled a little deeper into her bag.

The module was a lecture by a historian at a major university on how relations between the Sakahari Cooperative and the Lesser States were shaped largely by geography. The first part of the lecture covered ground that Sanira already knew very well, but she still listened with some interest.

"Duniya, the third planet in the system and our home, is in many ways a harsh world. Massive icecaps cover over two-thirds of the planet's surface, reaching greedy fingers from the poles towards the narrow band of warmth around the equator. In Prime hemisphere, our main land mass is half buried beneath the vast northern ice sheet, with a young range of mountains standing at its southern edge. South of these mountains is a broad triangle of elevated lands bound by two massive rivers, with an enormous coastal plain stretching for hundreds of miles out to the warm, shallow World Sea.

This is the heartland of the Sakahari Cooperative, a civilization whose formation was undoubtedly helped by it's position on the largest single body of rich lands on the planet. Nurtured by these rich lands and a culture that emphasizes cooperation and harmony, the Cooperative formed over five thousand years ago and has grown to a population of almost four hundred million souls. Whatever their caste, citizens of the Cooperative enjoy a standard of living known nowhere else on Duniya.

Elsewhere in Prime hemisphere, a collection of smaller states eventually arose to the east and west of the Sakahari Cooperative, occupying the southeastern corner of the main continent and a broad stretch of land in the secondary landmass that extends west until it reaches the frigid waters of the Outer Sea. Often warring with one another and sometimes with the Cooperative itself, these Lesser States have grown in power and importance. The legacy of their warlike past and centuries of almost unbroken warfare is a universal over-emphasis on maintaining expensive militaries, while ignoring the great advances available through peaceful science and space exploration.

The Second Hemisphere consists mainly of islands and two continents that peek from underneath the massive ice sheets, barely connected to one another by a long peninsula. The sparse population of this barren hemisphere lives with technology two hundred years behind what Sakahari and the Lesser States enjoy. Other than a few small cities and resource-collecting efforts controlled by various factions from Prime hemisphere, there is nothing larger than a village.

Four hundred years ago, the rise of the Lesser States began to upset the long Sakahari peace that ruled around the World Sea. The leaders of the Cooperative watched in dismay as warring states to the east and west engaged in savage conflicts over resources and religion, advancing their military techniques and weapons in leaps and bounds. Sakahari scientists had unlocked the secrets of the atom over a century before, but in 5962 the people of the Cooperative were shocked when the Nahktar Confederacy used a primitive fission device to destroy a city in a neighboring state.

It was clear that the Lesser States were becoming dangerous to Sakahari civilization and some began clamoring for a military buildup to ensure that outside threats could be held at bay. Thus, in 5965, the Aishywiar caste was re-formed and populated with three great families and seven lesser. Under the guidance of the Aishywiar, the Cooperative began a 100-year program to build military strength, including the mighty Shiva station, whose fusion bombs could drop from orbit onto any point on Duniya's surface in mere minutes..."

Sanira finally nodded off, leaving the the rest of the rest of the lecture to play to sleeping ears.

To be continued