Homebrew - a NaNoWriMo Novel - Day 14

RL (Real Life) intruded a bit today. Yet I managed to hit another 1,000 words bringing my 14 day total to 30,110 words! Enjoy.

"Do you have any other ideas for those modules? Because each habitat is something like eighty feet long and forty feet wide. That's a lot of cubage to use. If we rotated them around their long axis, say even five rotations per minute, we could simulate about 0.1g at the rim. Enough to keep things in place from centripedal force. Among other things, we could maybe build a truck garden in one, complete with veggies, fruit and maybe even a honeybee hive."
"Do you like to garden?" Dermot asked, wondering how he'd not discovered this about J'Shawn.
"Not me. But given the number of people up here, I'll lay odds several do. And some of those may know about raising fruit bushes and trees as well as all sorts of vegetable crops. Wouldn't you want to have fresh fruit and maybe veggies that haven't been either frozen or dried to the point of flavorlessness?"
Through all of this, Dora had taken notes, but with the latest turn in the discussion, she added, "Guys! Please! No mention of fresh fruit. I'd just about kill to have a fresh grapefruit; I'd eat it like you would an orange and skip the sugar just to have one in front of me"
"Me too! Not the grapefruit, but some honeydew melon or cantaloupe would do the trick. And I think Dora and I are a pretty good representation of what all the women up here crave. Yes, we get nutritious, wholesome, well-balanced meals, but none of it is fresh!"
"Those are actually good ideas. We could ask someone to send us a mix of fresh, whole fruit picked from dwarf fruit trees. Then we could save the seeds." Dermot turned to Ellen, "Didn't you say your mother loved to give out fruit from her trees to people in her neighborhood? Could you ask her to send some up, we'd all chip in on the cost of shipping. Is that okay?"
"Okay, that accounts for three of the four habitat modules. Do we know what we want to use the fourth one for? Or are we going to wait a bit until a good idea comes along?" asked Dora.
"We could put in eight levels of office space and rent some of it out to others who want to put people up here." J'Shawn suggested. "I'd want to keep at least one office for our own operations. In fact, given the size of these things, there's really no reason we can't make about half of the pizzeria module into freezer space and storage lockers for rent."
"Great idea!" She entered more notes into her notepad. "Okay, these ideas give us something to think about. We don't need to rush into any of them until we feel confident we can either get the supplies and equipment, but we can start setting up the skeleton of a business plan and timeline for each of them."
In the pause that followed, J'Shawn rubbed the back of his neck, clearly fumbling for words that seemed to fix in his throat. Finally, he spoke, looking down and not meeting their eyes.
"I've been meaning to bring this up, but Singhman had me into his office just before shift today. He's asking me to consider advanced pilot training."
"You mean the shuttles? He wants to send you to flight school?" Dora was stunned, she thought they had plans, plans including each other.
"No. No, not full flight school, but advance orbit-to-orbit training. Seem's my football reflexes are still good. It won't mean going back down, but the school runs nearly two months. So I won't be working the regular assembly shift. I'll stay right where I am, I just won't be working in our group for a couple of months, that's all." He watched Dora's face, trying to gauge her reaction to the news. At first, she had seemed appalled, but apparently the rest of his statement had calmed her down.
" I was meaning to tell you, Dora, but I just thought it would be better if all of you heard it in one go-round. That's why I didn't say anything earlier." He paused. "Well, that and I wasn't sure I wanted to take the training. But if we are going to do this, the pizza shop, the garden, offices and repair shop. I think one of us had better get as much flight training as possible on their dime. Is that okay, by you?"
Dermot caught the small negative shake of Ellen's head and refrained from letting J'Shawn know he supported the idea. Instead, all three waited to see what Dora would say.
"I... guess that's... Hell! I'm pissed you could not say a word through the whole shift, nor even afterwords, when we got back here! You were quick enough to have sex with me, but you couldn't let me know you were going to split up the group?"
"Baby. No. It wasn't like that. Until Patrick and Ellen came in here to talk about these ideas they had, I was gonna turn him down. And I was gonna do that because I don't want to split up our team. You know I love you, Babe. I figured since I was gonna turn him down there wasn't any reason to even bring it up."
"If you love me, you should have talked to me about it, even so!" she shouted.
"You're right. I should have. And I won't forget that. I promise you, I won't forget that." He shrugged, helpless, "I've never really had to share things like this with anyone before. So I don't always know how to handle them. Can you forgive me for being stupid?"
Anger fought a losing battle with acceptance across her face. "You big dope. You're forgiven. And don't go calling yourself stupid. Ignorant, ill-advise, un-trained, but never stupid." She pushed off and floated into his waiting arms. "As if I could keep up an angry snit against you for a decent length of time."