October 15th 3420 | Marcus Jones | Guythimar
I'm still waiting for this "portal expert" to actually pick a time and place to meet; he’s rescheduled three times so far. Not that the delays matter much, since Captain Stevensen is apparently stuck in a sandstorm. I say "apparently" because there's no way he can get a signal out though that weather. I can't even determine his location. I hope he's doing all right.
In the meantime, I've been putting in a lot of work on the new Guythimar base. (I tried to rope Captain Patterson into helping me, but no dice.)
Lookin' pretty nice, if I do say so myself.
I stripped what I could from the "Geronimo 4" base: the storage containers, plant cuttings, my workers' stations, most of the solar array. Left the empty buildings. They were mostly wood anyway, and I have no idea how to decontaminate wood short of burning it. And who knows, someone might stumble across the old place and put it to use—as an emergency shelter against the tentacles, if nothing else. I planted some message modules with directions to Guythimar, just in case.
Anyway, the new base is shaping up to be even better than the old one. Next I'll start work on the bunkhouse, so Captain Stevensen and his crew will have somewhere to sleep.
I sometimes wonder what it would be like if I had my crew here with me. My old crew. Rodriguez...Sasaki...Jackson, the old cuss...
Oh, I have my overseer and my other base workers, and they do a fine job when they're not plotting to drive me crazy. But they're not my crew.
I miss my crew.
I don't even know if they're dead or alive.
Well, I know some of them are dead. I saw two of the escape pods get blown to hell.
But I couldn't tell which was which.
When I remember that last battle, I think...maybe falling through a black hole to nowhere was a blessing in disguise. Maybe it's better not to know.