All in Good Time

by Mackey Chandler

  “I’m assuming you are on the inside to know the core reason for the Martian Republic declaring independence is that you are excavating and studying an alien starship?”

  “Yes, but it makes me shudder to hear you say it out loud. Only two on Earth know it and we’ve never spoken of it aloud even out on the street or in a restaurant for fear there is a mic somewhere that will hit on the keywords,” DeWalt said.

  “Well, my partner April had her grandfather accept a position with you folks before you broke away. When it became obvious he was too principled and independent to be manipulated they tried to kill him. They put something on the port seal of his room to make it blow out when it got cool at night to catch him in bed. Then they over torqued his suit bottle connections to suffocate him outside. Your leaders kill very easily and they are sneaky. We don’t like sneaky. We don’t like casual killing. We’re pretty sure you’d cheerfully kill us if it served your purposes. Besides which we think the whole premise about humanity going into a purple panic over aliens existing is a bunch of rot. You don’t see us running in circles screaming. I’m convinced your average working man will say, ‘Oh? That’s interesting. What’s for supper tonight?’ instead of panic.”

  “And yet you’ve kept our secret even though you find it silly,” DeWalt said. It wasn’t quite a question but Heather decided to treat it as such.

  “We’ve declared L1 a limit for armed ships,” Heather said. “If the Earthies know you have an alien ship we’d have to go to war with them to keep them from swarming past L1 in force to take your ship. They will all have fevered dreams of every sort of superior drive and death ray extracted from the wreck like a cheesy science fiction film. I can easily see them fighting amongst themselves over it and even one side destroying it if they can’t seize it.”

  “And if we were removed as the de facto legitimate government of Mars your claim granted to the southern polar regions would have no basis,” DeWalt suggested.

  “I can see how you’d think that, but if we really want it we could take it by force. Indeed if we had to fight the Earthies anyway we might as well. You noticed nobody is challenging our recent claims on the minor bodies. Now, you didn’t come here to debate our respective philosophies. You want something. Could you at least start working your way towards saying what you want?”

  “The Mars colony was set up with the assumption the European Union would increase spending past the initial costs used to sell the program. The expectation was a second transfer vessel would be built. Perhaps even a larger one. I have read in certain non-public documents that they hoped to bring other Asian or African countries into the project.

  “They even had support from billionaire tourists factored into the original plans. All that went out the window when the ship was discovered and secrecy became an overriding issue. We now find our infrastructure deteriorating with no plan to update or refurbish it. The next supply trip from the Sandman will take thirty people back to Earth. So will the one after presumably. It won’t be enough.”

  “Well that shouldn’t be a problem for the bloodthirsty sons of bitches,” Heather sneered. “They can just march the surplus personnel out the airlock. With a little careful selection, they can start their own eugenics program. These tyrannical sorts always get around to that after consolidating power.”

  DeWalt looked horrified, but much, much more. He looked guilty.

  “Oh, shit,” Heather said. “Never joke about your worst case scenario.”

  “That is why Director Schober is dead,” DeWalt said.

  “Somebody didn’t have the stomach for a little indiscriminate killing?” Heather asked.

  “I don’t know the details, but if Director Liggett didn’t do the deed himself he supported it. The plan was to remove as many as possible and leave a group abandoned at the primary site without environmental support or transport.”

  “I suppose I have to give him some credit for being unwilling to jump from dealing death retail to dispensing it wholesale,” Heather said.

  “It is by no means fixed yet,” DeWalt assured her. “Director Liggett still is not willing to release those who are aware of the scope of the project back to Earth.”

  “If you think you are going to pull that ‘Oh, look see what you made me do.’ crap on me I have news for you,” Heather told him. “I’ve run up against that mindset dispensing justice like you just sat there and watched. One ended up exiled to Armstrong and the other attacked a man for sitting eating with his ex-girlfriend and got beaten to death with a cafeteria chair.

  “I’d lead an expedition to clear your base corridor by corridor instead of just bombing it for the privilege of hanging Director Liggett if you try that line with me. You have to be one of the true believers we’d clear out, so consider that hanging will be a slow unpleasant prospect in Martian gravity.”

  “It wouldn’t require much help on your part to avoid all that unpleasantness and any risk by supplying a few very basic pieces of machinery to us,” DeWalt proposed.

  “I thought you needed another ship?” Heather said.

  “That would be ideal, but if you provided a compact mobile water gathering machine and extra feedstock to make and repair them it would extend the time until we run up against the resource wall by several years. If you can supply feedstock for heavier repairs for steel and help remove our unwanted population the Sandman can’t remove fast enough we could buy ten years.”

  “We have iron out the wazoo,” Heather said dismissively. “The other stuff we can get assuming we want to do this. What are you proposing to offer in exchange for those items? The other polar region?”

  DeWalt actually gasped and had to recover before speaking. Heather was unmoved.

  “I don’t think that occurred to my superiors. If you want me to take it to them as a counteroffer I will,” DeWalt promised. “I was not allowed to risk any of my one time pads by bringing them to the Moon so I’d have to return to Earth to communicate that. What they proposed is they have three small items not totally smashed from the alien ship. They appear to be discrete mechanisms, which is often not obvious, or easy to tell. Also, they are smaller and not difficult to transport like some of the objects in huge housings or systems made up of long runs of material all connected. We have nobody able to identify their purpose or even make a decent guess. We’d trade them to you for aid. It is a gamble for both of us. One could as easily be an alien sleep inducer that would never work for humans as it might be the key to synthesizing stable transuranic elements.”

  “But you are betting being fairly small they aren’t critical functions of the ship you’d be giving away even if one of them might be worth a fortune to humans,” Heather said.

  “Exactly, you made clear you know you are buying a few years of political stability also. We don’t want to deal with Earth any more than you do, and we, unfortunately, have far less ability to get along without them,” DeWalt said.

  “This isn’t going to happen overnight,” Heather warned him. “But if my partners can’t talk me out of it I will put my design people to making your first proto water extractor. The other stuff is just buying it. I’ll need to have two ships available to pick up our fee because I don’t trust you at all. I’ll need a ship on overwatch to protect the lander.”

  “I expect that will easily happen before the second Sandman trip from now,” he said.

  “Easily. I suppose you realize that if we get some piece of junk we quickly realize is a super-duper sewage pump or a vegetable slicer from their galley, we won’t be amused?”

  “I’d expect we were courting disaster to contemplate such a fraud,” DeWalt agreed.

  “Then you can tell your masters they have a tentative agreement,” Heather said

  DeWalt nodded and took a second to realize that was a dismissal.

  Chapter 12

  It was late enough Vic discouraged Pearl and Tommy from going home. Pearl could have made her house by dark but Tommy couldn’t. He’d have wanted to esco
rt Pearl home safely anyway and then he’d be stuck there for the night. Vic thought they’d rather stay here than back under her dad’s thumb. Arnold was practical enough to allow them to stay together at Vic’s but still old fashioned enough to insist on some decorum under his own roof.

  Vic was right. They readily agreed it was better to leave in the morning. Also, they hadn’t had any supper yet and would have had to hurry to leave on an empty stomach and impose on her family when they arrived. Fortunately, supper was a big pot of soup already made that would serve them all easily. That just meant that now there wasn’t going to be any leftovers for tomorrow. That would be Vic and Eileen’s problem.

  Alice craned her neck looking out the kitchen windows and then stepped outside the back door looking around.

  Eileen stuck her head out the door. “What do you need?”

  “Where is the outhouse?” Alice demanded.

  “There isn’t any. We have water piped in underground from a covered spring uphill. We have flush toilets and water at the sinks. Didn’t you see the faucets in the kitchen?”

  “I didn’t see anybody use them,” Alice said, eyes big. “I just figured they were there from before the day and not connected to anything now.”

  “No, but the hot water heater doesn’t work anymore. It ran off propane that is long gone. Vic keeps talking about making a wood-fired heater like Mast has but he’d need pipes and stuff that are hard to buy and hard to haul home from the festival. We heat a couple of buckets of water on the woodstove for now.”

  “That still beats washing in the stream or just a hand wash from a pan,” Alice said. “You don’t get sick from the water?”

  “No, whatever the source of the spring it seems clean enough. There is a concrete ring around it and a cap built over it. That’s all from long before The Day. We don’t have to boil the water,” Eileen said.

  “At the Olsen’s everybody got the runs pretty often because they were too lazy to boil the water,” Alice said. “They’d do it for a while after somebody got sick and then slough off after a couple of weeks and argue whose turn it was to get wood or water. It was pretty disgusting.”

  “That will kill somebody eventually,” Eileen warned.

  “Not fast enough,” Alice said.

  * * *

  There were six microwave towers Chen supplied as first-round targets. Two outside Chicago, two in New Jersey, and two between Seattle and Vancouver.

  “Should I hit these during the night when nobody would be working on them to minimize the possibility of casualties?” April asked.

  “No, that’s exactly when they might be upgrading or servicing them. You want to take them down when the markets are open. Nobody will be messing with them when it might interrupt the service,” Chen assured her. “How are you going to announce it?”

  “I’m not,” April told him. “This is a message aimed directly at the people at the helm of the financial markets. I don’t figure most of the public would understand their importance or care. I didn’t until you explained. That’s why I was interested in timing it right.”

  “I think the timing will be very interesting,” Chen said, smiling. “In fact, if I may, I’d like to make some suggestions about how to trade their anticipated reactions.”

  “Oh… why didn’t I think of that?” April said.

  “Take them down an hour after the trading day starts. I expect it will take them twenty or thirty minutes to come to a decision to shut the markets down. There will be no real reason to do so until the people with those special links demand it. You will want to make your trades on foreign markets that won’t declare the trades void after the fact.”

  “That’s easier anyway,” April said. “We haven’t been able to trade in North American markets for some time. Clearing the payments both ways has been too big a hassle once we were divested of dollars. The European exchanges are almost as bad. We have accounts in Australia and Japan that will do very nicely though.

  “I have other things to do and have never been the world’s greatest trader even when things were much more stable and predictable. My brother Bob was always the sharper trader. He’d feed me hot tips. I’ll give Dan, Irwin’s man, a line of credit to trade for me and explain what is going to happen. He can ride along with his own trades if he wants. How long will it take them to get the towers erected and in service again?”

  “In theory, you can put one up in three days if the base pad isn’t destroyed. I suspect the people who own them have enough influence to get portable units loaned from the military. If they can do that they may be back in service the next day. Do you intend to knock them right back down?” Chen asked.

  “Not immediately,” April said. “Can you provide a target list of all the fiber and cable routes in and out of Vancouver? I’d rather do something differently tomorrow to keep them off balance and wondering what I’ll do next. I can put a few rods in the right of ways you were telling me about and they probably won’t even be defended if their computer doesn’t see them aimed at what they consider primary targets.”

  “I’ll give you three points to cut each trunk,” Chen said. “There are only so many repair people and tools available to splice fiber. They will have to fly in extra techs from all over the country. If you are going to do that there are also still microwave links for phone and data traffic you need to destroy. The fiber will cut their bandwidth way down but the older stuff like obsolete phone company links will be just about impossible to repair.”

  Chen stopped and scrunched his eyebrows together.

  “What? You think of some reason it won’t work?” April worried.

  “No. How accurate are your rods if they aren’t intercepted and knocked off course?”

  “Not especially accurate. They use multiple GPS so they can locate themselves about like so,” April said, hold thumb and finger up a couple of centimeters apart. “The vanes that steer them, however, aren’t any good for precise maneuvering. They can weave back and forth a meter either way off the centerline as they drop,” she demonstrated with a weaving hand.

  Chen looked amused. “They might be off-target a full meter?”

  “Yeah, we never had any reason to make them any better,” April said. “It’s not like some of the Earthie systems that can steer a bomb right down a chimney. Why?”

  “If you want to take any of those data centers out of service again you don’t have to knock down their antenna tower. Almost all of them have a humongous transformer sitting outside. They are big enough to be seen on commercial satellite images. Now, since there has been so much counter-terrorism effort put into their infrastructure a lot of them have a berm put around them or at least on the side towards their property line. That’s to keep some idiot from putting them out of service with an anti-material rifle. But they don’t stand a chance against one of your rods. For a bonus, you aren’t going to kill anybody hitting one like you would by putting a few rods through the roof and they will take much longer to repair.”

  “They don’t have their own power?” April asked, dubious.

  “Sure, a lot of them have back up generators. But guess where they are sited? Most of them are so big for a data center that they are on an outside concrete pad, right beside the utility feed from the transformer. On most of them, you will get a two-for-one rod hit.”

  “Save that for round three or four,” April agreed. “Maybe they will be reasonable and we can avoid doing worse damage. It’s just amazing what a target-rich environment North America is.”

  “They’ve had years to build it up and in things in like power distribution they almost never take things out of service, they just keep adding to it,” Chen said.

  “It seems like a horrible mishmash of stuff just waiting to fail,” April said.

  “That’s exactly what happened when you bombarded Vandenberg a couple of years ago,” Chen agreed. “But it doesn’t take hostile action when the systems are such an interconnected mess. All it takes is an earthquake or a forest f
ire.”

  “OK, keep this target set in reserve for now, but keep in mind I don’t want to trigger another California size failure,” April said.

  “We’ll try not to,” Chen agreed.

  * * *

  “Tommy isn’t part of Pearl’s family?” Alice asked after they were gone.

  “No, he isn’t,” Eileen said surprised at the question. Vic looked startled and found a sudden need to put his jacket on and attend to some business in the barn. “I expect they’ll be married within the year. Her father approves of Tommy and you notice when we came back they seemed to be getting along just fine. If we’d come back to find Pearl back home then I’d have guessed they couldn’t get along and the whole idea of an engagement was dead.”

  Alice looked to be eleven or twelve years old at the most. Eileen really didn’t want to have an intimate discussion with her. Her own mother had never had a frank honest discussion with her about her picking Vic to marry, just criticism. Eileen didn’t mind a rescue, but she wasn’t up for taking a motherly role at her age. She wasn’t sure when she’d feel qualified for that, if ever. Not to mention there were a lot of things about the Olsens she’d rather not hear and have the worst she could imagine confirmed or expanded.

  “Did Pearl have to come here with Tommy?” Alice demanded with a frown.

  “Not at all,” Eileen assured her. “She has been quite taken with him for some time now. Vic would have never let her be here too if she was sent with no choice. You haven’t met him but her dad, Arnold, is not the sort to force her to pick somebody she didn’t care for.” Eileen was a little hurt Alice would think Vic would allow that. Or that she would allow it for that matter. Was Alice always going to be suspicious others were like the Olsens?

  “Vic and Arnold are both decent people and I’m pretty sure Mr. Mast is too.”

  “OK, that’s all I wanted to know,” Alice said, apparently satisfied.

  * * *

  “It makes sense to me rather than precipitating a crisis,” Jeff said. “Not that I love the Martians, but letting them collapse could start an ugly war.”