"It was."
She sighed. She'd seen plenty of war veterans in the Terran Empire. It was a subject that made both her and Caoimhe very upset. "War can do strange things to humanoids."
"Unpredictable results," he said.
"Exactly." She glanced around the little medical room. "So, what are we going to do today?"
"I have not decided."
She grinned. "So you get to decide what we do?"
"You just asked me to."
"No, I asked if we had anything we needed to do. There's a difference."
"Finding you some nourishment would be the first on my list, I think." He patted her hip. "Do a sweep of this station and make sure that all is secure."
"I would hope that you did that before when you first brought me here," she said.
"I brought you here because it is an unknown facility. I didn't say it was secure. However, the fact that it is unknown, and very few are aware of how to access it, makes it the most secure location on this moon that is available."
"How many bases like this are on this moon?"
"None like this. This place is a relic. Built long before I was born. One of the first stations we built here while terraforming the moon."
"This was a terraforming station?" she looked around again. "It's too clean."
"We like to keep things tidy," he replied.
"I like to keep things tidy, but this place looks pristine. And you were terraforming from here?"
"Yes, this was a major location."
"I don't know what kind of terraforming you do, but I've been to some terraforming plants on different worlds just in the Empire. They're never clean. There's always this grit in the air, and the floors can never be swept enough. When we went, I remember having to put on pants and heavy work shoes to protect my feet, but even through them, I could feel the floor grit."
"The filmo," he said.
"The what?"
"The grit you spoke of. Filmo."
"What is it?"
"A by-product of life."
She was about to ask for more, but he continued before she could.
"Reprocessing atmospheres and building up the biolife on a world requires nutrients on the cellular levels. So those kinds of processes take time, and they take fuel. But what does all fuel expel?"
"Gas?"
"A byproduct of the chemical reaction, yes. In many cases, it is a gas. For the level of reprocessing a planet, it creates filmo. That grit you felt."
"Why isn't it everywhere here?"
"We found a use for it."
"Doing what?"
