April

by Mackey Chandler

  "Sure, it's not really a mistake like you were talking about," April explained. "It had to be on the hub at first, because it was one of the first things needed before there were any spun sections. At first it was all construction traffic it was dealing with and guys had to be able to go in and out easily with a bulky hard suit on. My grandpa did some of the earliest work and told me a little about it. But after most of the construction was done and we got these corporate rentals, it had to be moved here, because the businessmen expect to walk down the corridor and have com and conference rooms and a place to eat close by.

  If there is a big construction project going on they still set up a radio shack in zero G and tie it in here for the construction workers. This door is unusually close to the corridor break, because the only spaces left were on each side and they thought two doors would be confusing. See how it's offset against spin a little though? The structural members run up the exact middle and you can't fit a door."

  Art nodded and held his pad up in camera mode for a shot of the corridor break.

  "Would you like to come to dinner tonight?" she offered. "My dad could tell you lots more and if we can get my granddad to come by, he actually helped build most of M3. It's really not any bother, we're like a little town here. People even stop my dad in the corridor and tell him things they should e-mail to maintenance, he just goes ahead and relays it."

  "Thanks, but I already promised dinner to someone I met." But he didn't say who, she noticed. Needlessly secretive people irritated her. "But I thank you and it was good meeting you," he said, leaning back and terminating the conversation by his manner. He didn't act like it was nice. It seemed to have made him cross with her. She had the subtle feeling this whole encounter had gone badly and wasn't sure why. He stood eager to leave now and tucked his pad back under his jacket, on his belt. April stood also, feeling slighted, because his demeanor was dismissive. He was practically rude after she had been friendly.

  When he flapped his jacket back, to put his pad away, the cloying scent fanned to her recalled a vivid memory. The unexpected shock must have shown on her face, because he hesitated, looking back at her when he had started to turn away. He looked like he wanted to say something more and looked at her again like he hadn't really inspected her before and was correcting the mistake. His eyes scanned her brazenly, the creepy way men and boys had only recently started looking at her and hesitated, looking right at the lump of banana and scanner in her pocket.

  She had the paranoid thought he knew she had something illicit, so strongly she hooked her thumb in the pocket and let her fingers slide in over the shape hiding it. She felt her face go hard at his lack of manners. She hated it when she lost control of it like that. The thought was crazy; there was no way he could know about her scanner. Yet if anything he froze for an instant seeming to skip a breath. Then he visibly came to a decision to drop it and walked away.

  April stood there, too shocked to decide what to do, until she sorted out what her nose was telling her, finding no alternative to the memories it evoked.

  * * *

  About a year ago she woke up one night and went out to get a drink. When she came out of her room the light was on in the kitchenette and her dad was sitting at their small table. The same odor had permeated the room, as she had just whiffed from Art. There was a hard case on the table and an assortment of metal parts spread on a soft cloth. Most of them were meaningless to her, but the diamond textured grips of a pistol frame and the trigger guard on the front of it were obvious.

  She'd just looked a question at her father.

  "OK, I didn't mean for you to see this," he said. "But since you have, I need to make sure you will leave it alone after I put it away and not go looking to mess with it."

  "I could just promise, but if you're going to trust me for that much, can't you tell me the whole story and have confidence in me to leave it alone because it's the right thing to do?"

  "OK," he agreed, "sit down and watch." He started assembling the weapon, explaining as he worked. He held the complete unit sideways to her on both hands, in presentation. "This is what you call a Colt .45. The number is the caliber, or nominal inch size of the bore and the projectile which comes out of it. This basic design version dates from 1911," he smiled in satisfaction at her raised eyebrows at the date. "It's a Browning design actually. Colt was long dead back in the 1800's although his company was still doing fine, but I doubt if collector trivia interests you at this point," he allowed. Then he changed the tone of his lesson and showed her the procedure to load and cock, unload and safe it.

  She picked up the bottle she suspected was the source of the odor because the paper label had an oily stain. Yes, it reeked when she brought it close and it felt slick. A glass bottle with a paper label was something rarely seen above the atmosphere. Hoppe's #9 it said on the bright yellow label and described it as powder solvent. She wondered if Hoppe's # 1 through #8 smelled as strongly? Her dad took the bottle back and put it in a hollow in the fitted case after checking the cap was snug.

  "April, I hope to never need this. Protection is Security's responsibility. I'm a manager not a politician and thank God, we don't have the crime everybody takes for granted Dirtside. In most any case I would walk away from an argument long before it became a fight, but sometimes there are irrational people and crazy circumstances and if it comes down to a man's family and friends being threatened with harm, you sometimes are left with no choice but to use force. It's the last ditch thing I'd do, literally backed in a corner. If you ever see things have gone so completely bad and I am not here to use this, then it would be better to leave it to someone like your grandpa who knows how to use it. Using it skillfully, while at the same time quickly weighing all the decisions and consequences of why you are doing so, or if you should use it at all, is a difficult skill set to acquire and you're smart enough not to use equipment you are not trained on, aren't you?"

  "Sure, Dad. When have I ever skimped on safety?"

  "You've always been a careful one," he agreed. "This is a bit much gun for you anyway. Check it out," he offered and presented the grip to her. He was right, her hand was too small to even get a decent grip on it and it was uncomfortably heavy.

  "I am going to put this back in my bottom drawer and I have no worries about it now we've discussed it." He tucked it away, gathered the case up and headed back to bed with no further comment.

  * * *

  What else smells like that? Nothing she ever smelled was remotely similar, it was as distinctive as vanilla and her nose was very discriminating. She was left with the inescapable conclusion the young man was carrying a firearm, which was definitely against all regulations and seriously worried her. He had already seemed unforthcoming and given the way she felt about deceptive people, she'd gladly bet everything else he said was suspect, until proven true. She finally composed herself enough to decide she needed to go back home. She had to talk to her dad and maybe he would send Security to see what this Art fellow was up to, before someone was hurt.

  Going back home hubwise and against spin, she came out on her residential corridor. It was an open through arc, with none of the partitioning like the corporate country to hide the up curve, but it still had soft lighting and carpet.

  Because it was the Director's home, they had a heavy-duty door just like a maintenance or equipment area. When she laid her hand on the entry pad to allow it to taste her, it gave a solid 'chunk' of six dogs retracting instead of a single latch. The hall she stepped into was also an airlock, but just a safety lock. The inside door was always retracted, unless it sensed a pressure drop, or you overrode and manually shut it. The cabinet in the short lock contained a pressure suit for each of them, just sized not custom and a couple SCI one-size-doesn't-fit-anyone p-suits, also for emergencies, rolled up into an orange cylinder.

  When the door was audibly latched tight behind her, she felt tension ease she was unaware of holding and let out an unexpected sigh of relief at being safely home
. She went into the kitchenette to put the banana peel in her mulcher, bag and all, as it was digestible. The green light showed it was safe to open, so the catalytic converter was keeping the methane levels down OK. She thumbed the lid open and tossed the peel in. There was only a faint earthy odor, like the fresh mushrooms she sometimes had on her salad at the cafeteria. She had two spider plants in the upper corners of her room and when she had made enough soil, would start a third. It made it smell better. She wanted a Peace Lily or a Song of India, but begrudged the floor space.

  The com screen signal was blinking, so she went over and slapped accept. Her dad was looking at her, but the icon in the corner showed it was a recorded message.

  "April," he said, "I'm with Tom Gollings. When he heard your mom was still in Australia, he invited me to dinner at his place. He says if you would like to come along too just drop us a message and they will set a place for you. He eats about 18:30, or if you want you can just eat with your own friends. Love you Sugar," he said, ending.

  Damn. No way was she was going to the Gollings'. They had two obnoxious little kids and she wouldn't get a chance to talk to her dad privately there anyway.

  She punched up his Director's address instead of his personal one and recorded with video. April described briefly meeting Art, but did not explain why she thought he might be armed. She promised to explain later, but suggested security might want to have a Taser or tangle gun to approach him. "I know it sounds over dramatic," she acknowledged and added "Nothing on the com from Mom," in case he hadn't checked and ended as abruptly as he had.

  She sat there thinking about meeting Art. It had been a new and unwelcome helpless feeling, when he had hesitated and turned back to her and she was embarrassed at her relief to be home behind a locked door. Knowing he had a pistol for a near certainty and she was defenseless, after getting such a bad feeling about him, was not something she wanted to experience again. When her dad showed her his pistol, the principle he had voiced was not she wasn't allowed a defense, but she was just not qualified to use that one.

  She pursued the line of reasoning and considered a solution. Heather was just the person to tell her if it was practical, so she called. The call went through and had video also, but it showed a bunch of cables and pipes, sweeping around in a blur until Heather's face finally filled the screen. The way it was jiggling around told April she was holding her pad by hand. April was happy she wasn't one of those snobs, who made you deal with her pad's AI to talk to her, as if she were too busy and important to answer directly.

  "April! Don't tell me you busted your new toy already!"

  "No, no, I haven't even played with the scanner yet," April assured her, "but I want to talk to you about another job already, privately," she emphasized. "Are you open for dinner? You can come to my place if you want. We'd have privacy to talk here."

  " I'd love to. I've never been to your place, but my mom would kill me. We had a big discussion about my not spending time with the family last night and she is having special company tonight and expects me to be here. But tomorrow Jeff and I are going to the construction gang's cafeteria for Thai food. They serve it on Tuesdays, Main this cycle and they don't mind regular station people if you go after the main rush is over. Why don't you go up there with us? And we can talk about anything you want. I want you to know Jeff better anyway, just as friends, even if we didn't do business."

  "So, I won't be an unwanted third butting in?" April asked.

  "No, really, we'd love to have you. And if we all sit and bounce ideas around, you will probably get a better widget. Are you coming?"

  "OK and if for some reason I can't, I'll call you for sure," April promised.

  "Good," Heather smiled, "and be sure to set the scanner out to run a bit," she instructed, as she signed off the call with her signature file -- she dissolved in a shower of glitter and a trill of a xylophone fading away.

  April was a little hungry already; she got hungry even faster when she was stressed. But she felt uneasy to go back out to the cafeteria with Art wandering around the corridors. This was the first time she had ever felt unsafe to go anywhere in M3. She had seen all sorts of news shows about people Dirtside, who were afraid to go out at night or afraid to travel around their own town, but she never ever thought she would feel this way. It made her sad and the more she thought about it, it made her angry. But she also remembered the way he had stopped and looked back at her. Something in her reaction to the odor had shown and if he kept thinking on it, the same as she was doing, he might conclude she was a danger to him.

  She didn't know what he could do to her. It would be pretty hard to shoot somebody and dispose of a body, even in a big habitat, unless you had a lot of help. But it was also supposed to be pretty hard to bring a gun into M3 and he would be the second person she knew who had managed the deed. In the end it sounded safer to stay in, until she got to talk to her dad.

  Looking in the kitchenette's meager pantry, there was a can of stew she could have for lunch and some crudités from having company a few days ago. If she opened a new box of crackers it would do just fine. She got a full size fork from the drawer, instead of the plastic one on the can and punched in the dimple that made it self-heat. Then she searched for her headphones without spex, she preferred for music. They were lying on her bed and she scooped them up and put them on.

  She put the scanner on the counter and told it, "Scanner connect to my earphones." The two talked to each other and established a protocol. The machine asked for a voice sample and she talked to it for almost a minute before it informed her it was enough and asked a password. Then when it activated April expected to hear Heather's own voice, but a commercial speech font said, "There are three active channels. They can be described for selection, or displayed graphically if you have spex available."

  "How may they be selected?" April asked.

  "Selection may be by frequency, type of modulation, content, signal strength, clarity, customary use, traffic level, direction, high stress voices and with accumulated data individual voices, languages, or similarity to previous transmissions. Multiple selection criteria can be prioritized in any order. A separate program can do a running surveillance to detect bugs retransmitting sound or com signals, real time or burst. Voice may be analyzed for probable truthfulness, stress level and gender," said the scanner.

  "Define content."

  "Content is voice, video, fax, data, code, burst, radar, carrier, encrypted, or combinations. Remember, when selecting, content may change during a continuous transmission." Apparently Jeff liked to leave short user hints in voice control. It was a fairly easy AI to deal with she decided. Some of them really irritated her and her friends couldn't understand why.

  The stew was venting a little plume of fragrant steam and she touched the recessed finger pads to make the top peel open. It was bubbling along the outside edge. I'm gonna burn my mouth on this if I'm not careful, she thought and stirred it to make sure the center got heated too.

  "Put on the clearest channel, with the most traffic, since I connected you to the earphones and listen in the background and advise me it you intercept messages containing April or Lewis," April requested and went to work cautiously on the stew.

  "Not any real danger," said an Australian voice. April immediately knew who it was. He was one of the security men who actually patrolled in uniform on the corporate level, or down where the shuttle passengers were coming in. "She has some planters on the corridor and when she came out to water them -- well, someone had already done the job for her, so to speak. Unless they make a habit of it they probably will just fertilize the damn things, but the old bat is fit to be tied. It really offended her sense of propriety."

  "Got any suspects, Sherlock?" asked a rich voice she had not heard before.

  "Well, from where she was wiping down the wall I'd say our vandal is maybe eight to ten-years-old, male obviously, So that narrows it down to what? A dozen?"

  "Yes," said the second voice. April
liked how this one talked. He had control and sounded intelligent. "The computer says eleven boys in the right age range and one of them happens to live two doors down the corridor with the Wu family. A boy, eight years old, named H - E - W," he spelled it. "You say it like 'who' and with Chinese you say the surname first, so it is Wu Hew. No wonder the kid is angry. He probably gets all kinds of crap from the other kids about the name. Could you talk to Mom and Pop Wu and express concern, you know, Hew, might have a little grudge against the old lady for some reason and if they could just talk with him about it and smooth it out, we don't have to be involved at all?"

  "Very 'punny' Chief," groaned the Aussie. "I will take a little stroll down there right now and have a word and maybe peer suspiciously at any little boys lurking about."

  "Sounds good," said the Chief. "Don't be shy to call for back-up if you get in over your head. Out," he ended.

  It was hard to giggle and eat stew at the same time. April was glad to hear crime was at its normal level on M3 and there were no running gun battles with company interns to listen to. She popped an olive in her mouth and went around the counter island to the com desk in the living room and opened the side door. Her dad had a feed for an outside antenna in the console, with a portable two way radio he could carry, or hook up here. April screwed the coax in the end of the scanner, set it out on top of the desk where it could talk easily with her phones and briefly instructed it to listen to external com traffic.

  April continued to listen, switched signals and played with different features, until all the crudités were gone and she had cleaned up from her lunch.

  "Audio off," she commanded and thought about it for a little bit. "Scanner listen to suit and ship channels and record any high stress voices, record any unusual signals not similar to prior transmissions. If a signal type accumulates six similar transmissions discard it as common. Do not record radar. Start a log to note what percentage of local traffic is encrypted." She was surprised by the silence. It was a lot for an AI to absorb without asking for clarification. Jeff and Heather really were meticulous programmers. "Scanner, do you have any port to sense laser light modulated to carry information, or used as lidar?"