April

by Mackey Chandler

  Ernie looked at Earnest and realized he wasn't being trusted with anything since he had a big dangerous babysitter assigned. Still he would be free to enjoy himself. He realized he could still have a pretty good time without putting a big enough dent in 5 million E' to upset this guy.

  "Sounds fine to me," he agreed. Of course the machine showed them his ambivalence, but Justine didn't really expect whole hearted enthusiasm for being reined in hard. He just wasn't giving him any choice.

  "Won't you have any trouble finding Eddie on II, or worry you'll be in danger of blowing his cover?" Ernie worried.

  "Ernie, Ernie." Justine scolded him and shook his head. "A flea could not sneak on board a station under your collar without my associates knowing. We'll be very discreet." He said with a sincere smile.

  * * *

  Friday October 15, saw Happy and Jeff extremely happy with the progress being made on their scooter. Two days of double shifts at Dave's Advanced Spacecraft Services had made as much progress as they would have expected in as many weeks, given the advances that had been made lately in automated assembly and prototyping.

  The level of competence Dave's workers displayed had been a surprise to them. They considered themselves the best in the business and they just might be right. The ordinary happened quickly and easily and the more difficult and custom work happened faster than Happy could have ever done in their own dockage. The tools and software the shop used were first rate and the workers had frequent and insightful suggestions about their more exotic modifications. Assembling the pieces they had contracted out was still slower than making them, but not by much.

  Fabrication and assembly took about a third of the time it had just twenty years ago, when Dave first started in this business. Some of the components had waited in the customer queue for a day or more and then actually been fabricated in minutes. The shear level of enthusiasm the workers showed had astonished him.

  On a few occasions the whole scooter had been literally so covered with bodies it disappeared. They looked like a swarm of ants attacking something. There were occasions an assembly robot worked on one system, arms a blur of motion positioning wires or turning fasteners down, while nearby humans worked at their best but much slower pace. Normally a robot would be allowed to work alone and human workers pulled back for safety. This time given the urgency they worked side by side, with a human worker standing watching with a kill switch in his hand ready to freeze the mechanical worker if it appeared to move outside it's programmed work area.

  April's grandpa was very happy the last few details would be finished in pressure. When Jon had informed him the latest from Eddie was his father would be bringing a new wife home and explained she was a fellow scientist, Jeff had locked up like a cheap computer crashing. His non-response was starting to scare them, but after a few minutes he shrugged it off and didn't have any questions. It was just as well because they didn't know any more to tell him. Still he seemed to be in a daze with half his mind reshuffling everything in his life to match this news.

  Happy wouldn't have trusted him in a suit, when he might not have his whole attention on what he was doing. Daydreamers and klutzes don't belong in vacuum. In fact, a good foreman would allow a worker a few days on a six month tour where they could just say they were out of sorts and didn't belong in a suit today. It wasn't fair to their work mates, to send somebody who didn't feel real sharp, out of the lock.

  There were several other jobs sitting on idle racks half done, while theirs was pushed forward, but all the workers knew the hurry up was for a reason. They understood it was to do a rescue. Several times now he had caught workers alluding to previous jobs, when speaking with Dave. He got the impression there might be a number of exotic and militarized private scooters out there which were not common knowledge.

  The shroud he had designed for laser protection was approved by the crew leader, but he suggested a slightly different mounting, which could absorb mechanical shock better and suggested the design change was warranted because a similar mount had failed under a heavy laser attack.

  It was the first clue Happy or Jeff had ever heard such an attack had happened anywhere. He had never seen any open discussion of military space action, in any news reports. The USNA , China, Australia, Japan and the European Union all had military ships and the Indians and a consortium of non-Protectorate Islamic nations had a commercial presence, which sometimes looked much more aggressive and well armed than a commercial presence needed to be.

  The French, English and Germans all had vessels which seemed pretty independent of their supposed European Union membership, just as they all still maintained consulates which were embassies in all but name, but nobody seemed to want to argue about it. He supposed it was inevitable someone had used the technology if it existed.

  The work leader also shared a sensor suite and navigational computer tie in, which would roll the vessel automatically if it came under laser attack, distributing the energy away from one spot where it might burn through. They also were given suggestions for armoring the cabin against ballistic threats, but they passed on that due to the mass and extra time.

  They noticed the specs and drawings for all these suggestions were already in the computer and ready to apply, suggesting they were prior art. When they were asked ever so very casually if they should leave any areas open or install hard points for mounting external 'safety equipment' away from the station, their growing suspicions were fully confirmed. Someone had been equipping private transport with missiles or some sort of guns.

  Their boldness gave Happy the courage to pull out the laser module Jeff had given him and asked a mount be added for four of these laser 'range finders', to be on the camera arm, which could be aimed by the piloting computer and manually operated from the flight controls. The man looked it over and saw there was an electrical connector. "Is this your power in?" he wondered. "No, it's the power out," Happy told him. The foreman seemed dubious about the usefulness of the laser if it ran on internal power, especially when he understood it was the working internals of a hand weapon - just a toy he figured, not a serious weapon. Until Happy opened the screen and shared the specs on it with him. Then he allowed as how he not only would see to its mounting, but wanted to be informed if there was any way to personally acquire one. Jeff assured him there would be some available with a slightly lower capacity power pack soon. Something rated at a few less kilowatt centuries, but still really respectable and he was tickled to hear he was the first to request one, so he was at the front of the line. It seemed like a reasonable incentive to a key worker.

  Happy had gone on in some detail explaining the history of automotive hot rods in the previous century to Jeff and the fine tradition of taking a plain vanilla piece of transportation and turning it into a ground shaking over powered monster, which would go three times as fast as any sane engineer had ever envisioned it doing. He seemed to find their endeavor a logical extension of the era. Jeff humored him but thought what they were doing could be better compared to the arming of certain merchant sailing ships and sending them forth with letters of mark and reprisal, to bring havoc and destruction on enemy shipping. Their hot rod ship would be faster than was accustomed, but despite a very strange old 2D video Happy had dug up about Road Warriors, he didn't think hot rods were historically armed.

  The good news was they were basically waiting on the last few parts from the proto shops to bolt on and they could boost out of here and rescue his dad from ISSII. Neither Bob or April pretended they were ready to pilot the boat, but Jon had already lost the argument that he was going to hire a pilot. An unspoken assumption among everyone who knew him was Bob just didn't have what was needed to fly a mission which might get challenged, but April had presented a friend and experienced scooter pilot, a certain Jefferson Carter Dixon to pilot the craft. He satisfied Jon and he was doing exercises on a Mickey Mouse homemade simulator, which was just a reprogrammed scooter training program on a commercial pad, with a couple flat sc
reens set for cockpit ports.

  He was glad the fellow went by Easy, so they were not confused by having two Jeffs. At first everyone wanted to volunteer for the other seat, which was obviously impossible. However everyone also protested Jeff going, not because of any personal defect, but because it would put him with his father on the scooter. They pointed out some people would not even use the same shuttle or plane together, for fear of losing too much of a family in one accident.

  Jeff suspected they really had an exaggerated idea of his worth. They were all privately thinking his mind was too precious to risk, because of a few stupid gadgets that were just logical extensions of prior art with no real breakthrough. But nobody would say it out loud so he could refute it.

  He complained their admiration was going to be a pain if it always kept him from having an adventure. Happy tried to explain to him from hard experience, that an adventure was always defined by the other guy getting his butt shot off, but when it happened to you it ruined the fun factor.

  Everyone agreed to send Jon was too visible and provocative a sign, of how important recovering Dr. Singh actually was for them. It might be counterproductive. Besides, Jon was better able to extend his authority from a distance through others. Better to keep it low key if it was possible to extract them without an uproar. Also, Eddie made clear they needed the extra cabin space for passengers coming back. So they could fit a crew of two only. In fact they would need to carry all three laying flat on a fuel bladder on the rear bulkhead, instead of formal acceleration couches.

  Configuring the cabin for more seats quickly was too difficult. They required major hand lay-ups of composite they didn't have time to do. They would have special conforming foam pads and a loose cargo net over them to keep them in place if they were not under acceleration.

  They laid out the one size p-suits on the pads for their passengers and loaded up all their supplies including two and a half kilos of green Kona coffee beans, in the military spec coffee maker they had found documented in Dave's computer. The heavy water they loaded in the hydrolyser, to generate deuterium gas for the fusion generators, was just barely more expensive than the coffee.

  Jon was talking mission profiles with April, to find some last minute way of discouraging her from flying. But the short version was still - he wanted Ajay Singh back. Nobody thought he or his friend could just walk on a commercial flight and return freely now, with two superpowers opposing it. The once he had suggested she should hire a copilot, she had suggested he hire a different scooter. She had him there and he knew it. It had not been his intent when he hired the scooter for her to personally fly the mission and he couldn't remember at what point she had managed to nominate herself for the job. He suspected she had smoothly twisted the general 'we' when speaking of accomplishing the mission, into a very specific 'we' that was Easy and her as a flight crew.

  Her parents didn't seem to share everyone else's concern about a possible conflict. The scooter seemed to be just another of Bob's many business ventures to them. When he nosed around the subject they pointed out he was seventeen and almost ready to live on his own and seemed oblivious to the fact April seemed to be calling the shots more than Bob. Any problem with Jeff's dad they wrote off as petty political posturing, an inconvenience, not a serious problem. They seemed to think the mission itself was a case of exaggerated concern.

  He might believe her mom didn't know any better, but if her dad believed that it could be a problem. As his boss, such an unrealistic perspective might keep him from making critical and timely judgments. He had no doubt at all her grandpa was as aware of the potential for trouble, since he helped design all the enhancements the scooter sported. At least one of which he knew they kept secret from Bob. So Happy was his last hope to substitute a different copilot for April. He was sure she'd step aside for him, because it was clear she absolutely adored her grandpa.

  "I'm too old for this sort of work, unless I get some life extension and mods to regenerate me," he replied to Jon's feelers. "Even Easy is getting old for a trip like this. It's a young person's game to work under a high G boost. It's her time to grow up anyway." he explained. "Some never get there and society forces them to assume their majority anyway. A few are ready early and they chaff and are held back, until some are even damaged by the wait. She has a shot at coming out in her own right time and I won't say anything to stop it because there is risk."

  "I lived with risk for all the hours I spent in orbital work, when there was almost none of the safety we take for granted today. I learned to make my own safety and gauge risk and survive. I lived with risk at her age on Earth, that people would condemn as criminal now, but we took as normal. I sent my boy off to school when he was just a couple years older than her, Bob's age actually and things were really bad on Earth. I wanted to keep him up here safe and I wandered if I'd ever see him again, but he made his own way and came back to me."

  "If we get a new nation here we should address the matter of majority better in our laws don't you think? The way we do it now doesn't make any sense." Jon agreed to talk about it later. He was avoiding any talk of a new nation, which was becoming common, even if he was privately making plans for what he considered worst case scenarios.

  Jon approached April with his thoughts. "I'm hoping you will just dock and board your people with no problem. They may not even know why you have arrived, until after you are gone, since you don't even exist yet as a well known business. Once you are undocked nobody has a right to stop you, but if the Chinese would insist on having Dr. Nam-Kah back, they might be desperate enough to commit an act of piracy. You realize it could end up ugly don't you?" He would have been relieved to have her bail out at his straight talk, even if it would have caused a mad scramble to replace her.

  "If we were totally confident, we wouldn't be bolting lasers on the sucker."

  Jon grimaced at the truth of it. "I wish I could send one of my people. I'd love to send Margaret with her attitude and the hairy great machine gun she adopted. Then I'd at least know nobody was coming through the lock at dock who wasn't invited. But we can't fit her. Three is a squeeze on the back bulkhead."

  "So lend us the great hairy thing and deputize Easy like you did McAlpine to give him your Taser. He is ex-special forces and must know how to use one."

  "He is?" Jon questioned, surprised. "It doesn't show that at all on his personnel file. Are you sure about that?"

  "His wife Ruby was a Loadmaster in the Air Force and they meet when he was in the habit of jumping out of her plane on black missions. That's why he has one of our laser's on his belt. I knew he has the sense and training to use it." Jon had never said anything to them, when he found out what the boxes were on their belts.

  "Let's get the parts of this thing all together here and see what will work." Jon called Margaret and asked her to bring the heavy machine gun along. He had to reassure her it was not for immediate use, or she would have been in combat gear with body armor. She surely would have scared the crap out of half the station, walking through the corridors. They all were to meet at the shop where the scooter was being finished. Margaret showed up first with a low wheeled robot luggage carrier following her, like a dog at heel and a heavy case sitting on top. She had Jon lend a hand and put the load off on the floor, telling the truck to take itself back home. She and Jon spread a heavy padded tarp like a movers blanket, on the floor and laid out the gun and its various support pieces and spare parts. By the time they had it spread out Easy showed up and apparently Ruby was off shift and had come with him. He immediately squatted down by the gun and asked if he could look it over. Ruby went over and was doing a slow walk around where the scooter was standing, clamped on a lift with metal claws grasping the frame rails. The shrouds were folded up away from the work areas, with foam protectors folded over their edges to protect against bumps. Safety orange strips were spray painted free hand, down the rounded foam edge. The panels could absorb a powerful laser beam, but you could punch a hole through one wi
th a good hard stab with a screwdriver.

  It became clear quickly "look it over" meant take the thing apart, when it came to Easy and machine guns. Any doubt Jon had about his familiarity with it disappeared when he started asking if they had a chamber gauge and where was the barrel wrench? Jon thought he was fairly conversant on the subject, but Margaret and Happy got into such technical jargon he wasn't sure what they were talking about, when they started detailing the differences between ballistic stability in air and in vacuum."

  He had to know just one thing. "Easy, the important thing we wanted to find out is - can you shoot the damn thing?"

  "Well of course." He looked offended. "It's a common weapon. The basic design is Israeli, from about 2035 and it has gone through just a few major revisions. This 12mm version was made in the US under license of course. There's a 14.5mm version too. You can feel in the dark and tell the differences. They are so simple and rugged you can beat 'em with a stick and not bust them. I've sat with a sand storm blowing over us for hours and when you needed one of these to start cranking out the rounds they never jam up. Typical IDF stuff - first rate."

  Jon gave him his best smile. "And where would this sand storm have been in Illinois, my devious friend?"

  "Hey Jon. The information was necessary operational intelligence. We're not gonna trade friendly war stories. No can do. Lips are sealed," he said with an exaggerated zipping motion across them. "They'd lock me away and send a deaf guy to pass gruel through the bars twice a day, if I blab certain stuff."

  "How would you feel about taking this little insurance policy along on your flight? I'd deputize you into our security force and you could feel free to use it if you encountered any pirates, or rabid woodchucks. Think it might be useful?"

  "I think I should have let a certain load of beams wipe the rear end off a misplaced space plane and we might not even be having this conversation. Too late now," he sighed. "Only problem I see is if we have trouble with the USNA instead of Chinese. If they should know who I am, they can legally call me back to active military service and I have a real problem if they should want to give me orders. If for any reason you get a communication about my status, call and just tell me I have a letter from my uncle, OK?"