April

by Mackey Chandler

  Well Jon already saw us together tonight and others will too. We were innocent of any conspiracy then, we just need to act the same now. We don't need to tell anything about us or our goals, or what these do for that matter. They are yours and you need them guarded, what does it really matter what they do? He might have some idea where they would be safer. But I would talk to him frankly about the legal problems with the Rock, your dad is handling. We don't know for sure yet that isn't a factor too. He has other investors here too who might need more protection."

  Heather looked at April. "Do you think if it comes to rebellion Jon will be on our side?"

  "I think it depends on how it happens. He respects authority and is sworn to it. Yet he regarded the spy as an enemy, even though he is probably operating with the full authority of the government. But he was here endangering the people Jon is sworn to protect with no warning. He was upset about that. If they just start shooting at the Rock, I think it will offend him. But if they declare their intentions and occupy the Rock after giving notice they are doing so in accord with law, then he may feel any rebels are getting what they deserve, if they resist."

  "I admit, when I talked to him about the spy we disagreed on details, but in the end we agreed to be on the same side. It wasn't as total a commitment as ours just now, but you saw how he acted when I was in trouble at the cafeteria. I don't think it would be too hard to get you two under the same umbrella of protection, so to speak."

  "But what about you Jeff? From what I saw at the buffet you have studied some sort of martial art under Jon. Doesn't it already give you some sort of friendship?"

  Jeff seemed flustered. "April it's so complicated. Jon my instructor, is not any other Jon I know. It is so formal and the rules and thinking are so different, it is like two different people when I deal with him robed, or unrobed. I don't mean this as a negative, but I'm seeing Jon has an amazing ability to compartmentize things in his mind. He seems to switch viewpoints between his official life and his personal interests, more than most people would be able. How about you calling Jon on our behalf and telling him about the room," he indicated with a gesture, "and see if he can help us with keeping these generators safe?"

  "Smart," said Heather. "I told you he is smart. We saw how the April-oriented Jon acts today, so that's the Jon we enlist. You need to show her the other pieces also," she reminded Jeff.

  "You both trust me to arrange this?" April asked.

  "I think we are past the question," Heather said. "Yeah, take care of it for us."

  "Just checking, because I want to call Jon before it's late and he's in bed. I don't want to drag him out of bed again if I can help it. I know he'll want to see the room right away."

  "Go ahead," said Jeff. "We have some other stuff to show you then."

  April opened her pad on the counter. She didn't make a point of showing them, but she didn't cover up either. She punched in 898989. She expected his apartment again, but it was an office, with some diplomas and certificates on the wall behind him.

  "Jon's Sanitary Services," he said perfectly deadpan.

  April thought about going along with the joke, but didn't have the nerve. She was still struggling too much to just be credible with him.

  "Jon, I have some more information on our jumper," she said straight away. "Jeff here found his father's bedroom trashed and it has the uh, same garbage drawn on the screen," she didn't want to say SEAL thinking of snoopers, "It's a day old, almost two actually, but I remembered how careful you were with the hotel room. What do you want to do?"

  "Have any of you gone in the room?" he asked, immediately concerned.

  "No," April answered. "Jeff opened the door with a pen, instead of his hand and we all looked in, but we closed the door and he did not fan it around, he opened and closed it slow. However, he slept here last night and we all sat and ate dinner in the apartment."

  "I will be there in ten minutes or so with a team. Don't touch each other. Don't go back outside for anything," he hesitated. "You did pretty good," he added and the screen blanked.

  "I want to show you these too before he gets here," Jon said. He pulled another small box from the larger one and produced another tube. The part he removed was similar to the first, but had no tubes in or out and the metal contacts were different. "Heather tells me how smart you are. So you tell me what this one does." He didn't seem to mean it as a challenge to her ability, like some ego driven people would have enjoyed doing, hoping in her failure they would seem elevated.

  April took it and turned it in her hands. "Well unless you have discovered how to suck power from the vacuum, there's no way to fuel it so I would say it is an ultra capacitor. It probably stores quite a few joules more than a regular commercial one, to have these big leads just like the other. She brags on how smart you are too, but I think we will find it is in different areas for each of us."

  "It would be good actually, for us to bring different talents," Jeff claimed. But you guessed pretty well. This device isn't mine; this is something we got from our friends on the Moon. We traded with them. We granted them a license on some software they badly needed and they grant us a limited license to make these. It works out nicely, because they very much complement each other. I would call it a battery or accumulator though. It stores much more than any capacitor and makes NO neutrinos," he added.

  "How many amp hours?"

  "It's not a very good way to rate it. Do you understand E= mc²?" he asked.

  "Of course I do," she said indignantly. "I'm not ignorant!"

  "Well, when this size is charged up, it will mass somewhat less than two grams more than when empty. Or if you want some real strange bastard unit, we could use kilowatt centuries."

  April let out a long, low appreciative whistle. "And how fast can you charge and discharge it?"

  "Well now, there's a problem with that. You don't want to damage or melt the substrate," he said. "If you do it will release the whole charge in a couple microseconds. That's not a problem with the fusion generator."

  She looked at the piece in her hand and thought. "But you could short it out and melt it on purpose right?"

  "Yes, you're quick to see the implications," Jeff admitted. "And if our lunar friends had seen this problem coming, they probably would have never traded design details and rights with us. They found out the danger the hard way, by pushing it past its limits. Fortunately, they had it fail well away from their base and the boom was small enough to explain away as a meteor strike."

  "They hadn't stored all that much in the one that failed because it was a lot smaller. You can make them a lot smaller or bigger. Once they knew it could be destabilized they were pretty much obligated to tell us. What if we pushed one too hard and vaporized M3 because they didn't warn us?"

  "It would take a lot of power to charge it up to that dangerous a level."

  Jeff just gestured at the fusion generator.

  "Well, yeah, point taken. Two grams." She started trying to calculate in her head.

  "On the short side," he reminded her. "But instead of joules or watt hours, call it forty Kiloton, for the military mind."

  April looked at the device with fresh horror.

  "And how many was Hiroshima?"

  "About fifteen."

  "Kargil?"

  "About a thousand actually, but it's not easy to compare, because it's not linear at all, you need to cube the power to double the blast damage you see. You get quickly diminishing returns. This is why superpowers use several small bombs, instead of one big one, it's much more efficient," he said with seeming cold indifference.

  "But the big thing for us is not that they can be made into a weapon. Rather they very much compliment our miniature fusion generator. The generator can run at constant output and the storage device lets us pull high peak power off the combination. Of course it can be used that way for other sources of energy. The Loonies have almost limitless solar power to charge them. Still, we have a window of opportunity to use the two
together, before the device becomes known publicly. That may be quite a while, they are holding this one close, since they found that wee problem."

  "Jeff, I think you should get one of these fusion devices to a safe place with whatever documentation about how they work and are made, because somebody is looking for them. The Loonie device you should hide too, even if they don't have anything to do with the neutrino emissions. Nobody is looking for them, but they might find them looking for the other. You don't have any right to reveal them to third parties. But I'd like you to keep some handy to use. You may need to use them for what I want you two to build next," she said.

  "I was thinking something similar, so let's leave some samples in a box and I will put the rest away before Jon gets here," he shuffled the containers, leaving one of the smaller boxes on the table. "I'll send the extras and Loonie stuff home with Heather. There's no reason anyone should know about them, or imagine she's holding something for me."

  "So what is it you want built, we were supposed to talk about tonight?" He asked, when he returned, amused at how the original purpose of meeting had been eclipsed.

  "I'm thinking of a small case, disguised to look like a pad or inventory taker, with a powerful laser as a personal weapon. It should be adjustable, so it can scan first through a range of frequencies and read the infrared signature back, to see what color is absorbed well and then lock on to pulse. It should have a handle and trigger that folds out and a view screen for aiming which can zoom. A low power aiming laser, a designator like Jon's Taser has, would be nice also."

  "That sounds good," Heather interjected. "Do us copies, just like the scanners."

  "What you are asking for wouldn't have been very practical without one of these cells," Jeff said. "I could have made it, but it would have depleted any power source I could use, in three or four shots. I can add another improvement. When a laser strikes a target like sheet metal, the shock wave from the plasma boiled off the surface is often what does the real damage, but the plasma blocks any more of the light from getting through. I'll break the beam into short pulses and vary the time between them so it can find the physical resonate frequency of the target and shake it apart with the timed pulses. With that sort of a chopped beam I can give you a setting which gives you a pseudo continuous beam, without overheating too fast."

  "How about you, Heather? Any features you want on them?" Jeff inquired.

  "Yeah. I want mine in a designer color," she joked. "Something not too shiny and hard to see. And if it's not too hard to do I would like a taste lock, like on a door, so someone else can't use it unless I punch numbers in a keypad to release it. You'd unlock it to use it in a p-suit by the keypad," she suggested.

  "You know, these cells I have here are actually too big for this use, but they're what we have made and I will use them for us if I can't make smaller. We have to get together and talk about making a bunch, about a hundredth as big as these if we're to have a bunch of them for our cause." He stopped talking then, because the door chime sounded. "Unlock," Jeff told the house.

  "Come on in," he invited.

  Chapter 9

  The woman who entered the Singh apartment wore a shiny paper jump suit with hood. It was complimented by a disposable breathing mask, with a plastic eye shield. She stopped inside the door and kneeled to unroll a soft pack on the floor. First she took a pink aluminized Mylar pouch out and ripped it open. The cassette inside she inserted in a plastic case and switched the device on. An LED on the face started blinking amber and she laid it back down.

  She retrieved another calculator size plastic case and opened a lidded plastic tray before approaching Jeff. April noticed the suit sort of stood away from her and had a sharp odor like she smelled in Heather's work area. She realized then the suit was one of those biohazard suits, that carry an electrostatic charge to repel airborne particulates like bacteria. She had read about them but never seen one before. Her voice was somewhat muffled in the mask. It didn't have a booster speaker.

  "You have the pen used to open the door?"

  "It's this here." Jeff said pointing to the pen in his breast pocket.

  "In the specimen tray please," she asked. "And hold your hands out, fingers spread."

  She held the case over the pen and a speckled pattern of scintillating laser light scanned the pen. She played the light over his hands also and examined the readouts on it briefly. The device she'd left on the roll gave three sharp beeps and the light changed to green, but she ignored it.

  Taking a small can clipped on the side of the instrument, she sprayed a mist on the pen and then Jeff's hands and then repeated the reading all over again. "Flip them over," she instructed and examined the backs and wrists carefully also. April could not see any mic or radio on her, but when she was done she spoke, as if to someone else, not them. "Looks clean so far… There are no chemical agents, or pathogens detectable. I'm going to test at the door. The one on the right?" she asked Jeff. He nodded yes.

  She scanned the handle and then drew it open very slowly in her gloved hand, until it was all the way open against the wall behind. She scanned the backside and the carpet in front of the door. Then she pointed it at several areas inside and scanned but didn't enter. Lastly, she sprayed a puff of the mist into the air inside the door and played the scanning light through cloud as it floated there.

  "We are clear for all knowns in here," she announced and pulled down her mask. She fiddled with something on her left cuff and there was a snap of electricity discharging and the suit suddenly got wrinkles and hung a lot looser.

  Jon was next through the door, with a young man dressed like the lady, but with his mask down and his suit limp. He was carrying a big duffel. "Stay there a minute." Jon called to them and went to the doorway where he briefly looked in. Then they all put their heads together and conferred in low tones. When the man started taking photos through the doorway, the young woman came back, to pack her equipment.

  Jon came to join them and pulled a chair down, unfolding it. Jeff poured him tea without asking if he wanted it. Jon was dressed casually, with cross trainers and elastic waist pants and seemed relaxed when he sat.

  "Do you know what time the room was tossed? Jon asked first.

  "It was like this when I came home Sunday night," Jeff admitted. He expected Jon to jump on him for the delay in reporting it, but all he said was "I think you know now there was some risk bringing your friends here, don't you?"

  "Yeah," Jeff admitted. "I was clueless and lucked out, didn't I?"

  "We all get a free one now and then," and Jon dropped the subject. "So, what were they after and did they get it?" he wanted to know.

  "Two possibilities we know of Jon. First, my dad is meeting a lawyer while he is at a conference on ISII to speak with him about the problems with the Rock. They may have wanted information about how the investors plan to defend their ownership, legally or physically. April's dad has expressed the idea it may go against us in the World Court and he also said some of the investors would actually fight to keep their share. Someone tried to move my dad's computer. As you can see it was booby-trapped."

  "Does your dad really need a super computer, instead of just a chip in a screen and net processing?"

  "Nanofabricating takes some pretty powerful modeling Jon. We both use it for designing the product too, not just the fabrication sequence. Believe it or not it sometimes runs for a couple hours, before it optimizes a complex design."

  "What happened there? Did your charge ignite instead of detonate?"

  "Oh no, Jon." Jeff seemed shocked at the suggestion. "It wasn't a dud explosive charge, it was just a hunk of thermite taped to the memory module. It was in a graphite and ceramic crucible, but the guy flipped it on its side and the molten steel ran out and got away from him. We never expected someone to tip it over. I still don't know why he did that."

  "It was probably something as simple as he felt more comfortable taking the screws out with it laying on the long side," Jon offered. "It
might have been simpler if you had used about a tenth kilo of plastique instead and we would be scraping SEAL off of the ceiling with a putty knife." The idea did not seem to keep him from enjoying his tea.

  "Sorry," he said looking at the shocked expressions on all their faces, "but where billions of dollars are at stake things will get rough. I wish it were different, because I have to protect many of the investors. But half measures and subtlety will not do."

  Jon sipped his tea and scrunched his face up even harder until he had lines in his forehead. It was so obvious he was thinking something over they just kept quiet.

  "What I want to say, is you are all too young to be involved with this ugly stuff and you need to be protected and removed from any possible harm. But there is nowhere safe to send you and I can't lock you up in your cubic. Practically, I know that's impossible and Jeff's dad isn't even here to say what he would want. April has more than average protection, just because her dad is manager." He looked at each of them in turn like he was gauging them. "And I can see if I told Heather to stay away from you two, because of your Rock involvement, that wouldn't mean anything would it?" he asked her.

  "Zip," she confirmed. "They are my dear friends and partners."

  "Well be aware. This guy wasn't the only one snooping around either. It isn't public yet, but we had another one. I don't think I should hide that from you when you are targets. Who knows if there is a third or fourth? I'd appreciate if you didn't talk it around for awhile, but you should be aware, to be cautious. Don't assume this is all over. Next time you want to protect something, come see me and I'll show you how to protect the computer with something which won't melt through the deck and into the next level."

  "Was he a SEAL too? Did this other spy flee the station like Art did? Or do you have him in custody?" April bubbled over with questions.

  "You might say he's in custody," Jon allowed. "We have no hard proof he is connected to Art. Right now he's in the clinic's cooler - morgue if you want to call it that, while we arrange a believable story about how he got there." Jon looked entirely too happy about that for the three's comfort.