<div class="floatleft">(http://elliquiy.com/elluiki/images/f/fa/Mars_test.jpg)</div><table class="bbc_table"><tbody><tr><td><strong>Character name:</strong></td><td>Lt Colonel Louise Cotter</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Location:</strong> </td><td>Dining hall</td></tr><tr><td><strong>With:</strong> </td><td>Laura (leaving), several others, coming for food.</td></tr><tr><td><strong>Doing:</strong> </td><td>Trying to be sociable.</td></tr></tbody></table><br/><hr/><br/>I shrugged at Laura's question regarding crops. "Better ask Hydroponics that", I grinned and wolfed down my soup. "Damn, I needed that. Gold stars to the two in the kitchen!" Laura indicated she needed to get back to work, and I did too. I had that mysterious message from Holtzmann to address, but first, there was something else I needed to do. I spotted one of the communications people, Thompson, just entering the dining hall and called her over. Was the main comms array operational yet, I asked. Her answer wasn't encouraging. It was working but with the reactor at 50% there wasn't enough juice to send a signal to earth without browning out other vital functions.<br/><br/>I thanked her and let her get back to her meal.<br/><br/>More people were coming into the dining hall and I nodded to them. I knew them all of course, from their files, and most I'd met several times before. All were excited to a certain degree. Could one of them be our thief? I didn't think so, but before I could confirm this, I needed to get a secure message to Russell Base, Australian Capital Territory, and speak to someone there who I knew I could trust intimately. Air Marshal Macmillan Cotter.<br/><br/>My father!<br/><br/>In the mean time I spent a little time circulating around the tables, making sure everyone was comfortable, and there were no complaints. I did get a couple about the décor, and lack of windows, but I explained that being this far underground made windows impractical, and as soon as we had the reactor at full strength, we could start up the holographic displays and view screens. In the mean time there was always the observation lounge on level one.