April

by Mackey Chandler

  Singh Nam-Kah spoke for the first time, so her voice startled them with its conviction.

  "No, we should not be running away to Luna. My husband and I should not abandon his son on M3 and there are others there we need and they need us. The container I brought on board needs to go there, so we can resist the hand of the Chinese, or Americans, or anyone who wants to enslave us and steal our work and our future."

  Easy agreed with her, but worried she'd been listening to too many strident political speeches. Maybe she was just a bit of a drama queen.

  "Thank you ma'am. I'm glad to hear you speak up, but considering the danger we're in and what we may face back in M3, could you trust us more specifically, about what the package is you brought along? And how would it help us resist the Earthies?"

  From the long pause, Easy thought she was going to refuse.

  "It's the essential element of a larger machine, which was too difficult to bring along. We destroyed the rest so someone could not deduce what it held, or its purpose. This sample is all of this new material which exists right now."

  "If you squeeze off a magnetic field which passes through a torus or cylinder of it you get a very strong effect," she said somewhat cryptically.

  "A useful effect?" Easy wondered.

  "Very useful. It creates a line along which there is an intense gravity anomaly. It's going to take a lot of study to see exactly what is happening. The effect along a line, through the axis of the torus is similar to a very strong tidal shear. But surrounding a straight line. You don't want to get in the way. You should see what it did to the wall of our laboratory! We were very fortunate nobody was allowed in the chamber when it was actuated, since it punched a neat hole through the wall and vented it to vacuum. The metal was pushed outward, so it was a funnel shape around the hole, like it had been punched with a big awl."

  Easy was trying to picture how you could use it as a weapon, which would punch a hole in something. "So how far away will this effect propagate before it spreads out or gets weak or whatever?

  "That's a really good question, we need to test better. We had two trusted colleagues on the moon drive a rover out, to overlook a crater not visible from their base and aimed this at the crater from ISSII and activated it several times. They reported a fountain of dust and regolith puffed up from the surface each time we activated it and we were trying to get a handle on the propagation time, but after three shots we had to stop."

  "Why?"

  "Well, we had no direct evidence to prove any connection, but they experienced a Moon-quake. They're very rare you know. And we can't tie them together, but the chance it was just coincidental seemed remote and we didn't want to endanger our friends, or the nearby base. They're not too happy with us anyway since we wouldn't explain what it was we were testing. And some of the other people on base suspected they were involved, since the quake was centered deep, off the direction they had traveled from the base. Their officials went to some trouble to check all the supplies of explosives, to make sure they had not taken any out to the crater and caused the quake some way they were not owning up to."

  Easy got a really scary idea.. "Ma'am. I'm just a pilot and a soldier, who doesn't have any deep scientific training, but is there any possibility this effect would pass right through a body like the moon and maybe be as damaging coming out the other side as it was going in? Is there any chance even it would fly off to the stars and piss off somebody far away, we might not want to meet when they are angry?"

  "Oh no. It interacts with matter too strongly. If you fired it off at the stars it would be attenuated from interstellar gas and dust, long before it got there. As far as pulsing it at the Moon or the Earth, there's absolutely no chance it would come out the other side. I'm sure it would only penetrate a few kilometers at most."

  "OK, good. Thank you," Easy said. He still had some concerns. He had a hard time envisioning a line reaching down through kilometers of mass, to say punch a hole through a submarine deep in the ocean. "Ma'am, it must take a lot of energy to pulse this thing if it can punch down through a couple kilometers of material. Are we going to be able to power it?"

  "It seems to move much more matter than the input dictated. We don't understand why yet either. One of the last tests, before we dismantled it, might help explain why. When you create the line along which the shearing takes place, the gravitational pull next to the line seems to diminish. So it may not be creating it, so much as collapsing it into a line from the surrounding field."

  "In fact one of our associates suggested if we went deep into interstellar space the effect might be much weaker and the strength of the field out there could be looked at as a measure of how much matter is actually in our universe. A possible interesting basic measure of our universe, just as the background microwave radiation shows us about the early moments of the expanding universe."

  It was more than Easy really needed to know.

  "OK then. I agree with your plan April. I'm sure if they have anything that can reach us at all, we're going to get an intercept. Anything we can do to further reduce our radar cross section is a good idea. Let's get the steel wool glued on, because the sooner we make our burn and stand off our location, the safer I will feel. Now does anybody else here have any experience at p-suit work in zero G?" No one volunteered.

  "I have something to contribute." Dr. Singe spoke up for the first time.

  "Sure Ajay. What is it?"

  "You wish to be off the path they expect. May I suggest leaving a decoy on our present path, so you can watch from afar? If you orient yourself to return to it with your exhaust away from them, you can sneak up on them."

  "Sounds real good but what can we leave behind that would look like us? We don't have enough steel wool to knit a replica and I don't have any big rolls of sheet metal.

  "No," Ajay said, not offended by the humor, "but you don't have to make a decoy which looks like this vessel to the eye. Just the same approximate appearance to radar. I would make a cube of wire, about two-thirds of the size of the shuttle length along each side and put a small corner reflector at each of the eight apices of the cube, so they all add up to about the same radar cross section as this vessel. They will know something is wrong when they can't see anything a few kilometers away. But they'll have to get very close to see what is actually there and I bet curiosity will compel them to do so, don't you?"

  "Yeah. I think you've got a plan there. You're right, we have wire in the emergency repair stuff and we can come up with enough gold Mylar for repairing insulation, or the pouches and meal trays from the trash, to make the reflectors. You're in charge of making it up. Just tell the other two what you want for help and April and I will go work on the computer and plan an external work routine for stretching the wire between us and extending it to a full cube standing at opposite ends of the ship. Then I'll give one corner a little tug and duck down and it'll sail off over our rear end. Come on April, we'll go up front and compose a simulation. You are the only one with a conventional suit. I'm afraid you are going to have to help me. It's too much to do alone. One bad thing - I bet you didn't know to bring along mask, did you?"

  "What kind of a mask? I mean, we're not going to be breathing fumes or anything, it's outside"

  "Not, a mask - mask. You paint it on where you don't want the glue to stick. We glue on panels and things all the time in construction and it makes you look mighty silly when you get some on the wrong place and you glue your arm across your chest, or glue your fingers on the release for your safety line. Out here it could fatal."

  April confirmed his fear, with a sad Earth style head shake no. "But I'm used to zero G pretty well, because our family owns unspun cubic. I just am not used to the suit. How about if you stick the pieces on and I'll tear them off the bale after we uncompress it and hand them to you?"

  The plan sounded good and they also determined he could use a set of over gloves, from the one size suits the passengers were wearing.

  First thing on exiti
ng the wire cube was pulled into shape between them. Each took a corner and moved away from each other until the wire was straight. Easy calling off the steps they had rehearsed inside by the numbers. It disappeared over the stern almost like they had planned. Slightly lopsided from the small tug Easy gave to launch it and just a bit smaller than they had wanted. But it might work. By then they were tired and ready to go back inside for a break. Instead they started at the tail putting down steel wool.

  First task was to unbind it without getting hurt. Easy had a tool made from his pocket knife, taped to a piece of strut repair tube. Behind the knife he had a crude barb, made of heavy wire. While he stood ready, braced to the hull with a safety line, his funny little spear at ready, April gave the pillow sized bundle a slow shove to drift past him. He poked not straight at it, but from the side. As soon as the point cut a nick on the surface under tension it expanded like a kernel of popcorn, faster than the eye could follow and pushed his spear back hard, with a motion he absorbed by twisting with it.

  The wool had expanded half way up the shaft leaving the knife and barb jammed deep in the expanded fuzz ball. He and April started at the tail and worked forward until they reached the lock, then worked from the forward ports back to the front of the lock. They had to carefully avoid where the lasers folded out and avoided the area directly under the radio antennas, because Easy was sure they were adjusted to function over the bare shroud surface. They'd try to turn the poorly covered area away from any pursuit. The front view ports were gold spattered, down to about 80% transmission at visible wavelengths, so they should not let radar in the front to bounce around the cabin and return either. The chance the flat port would point right back at a receiver was small, but they would be careful how they oriented it too. They didn't try to make it neat, figuring any rough surface would be more absorbent than a smooth one.

  The final band around the middle was just wide enough for them to work side by side, backing away from the hatch until they came back around to it. It was cramped hard work, holding themselves in place against safety lines and part way through they discovered they were using glue too fast and had to figure out how to block some of the orifices in the applicator. It spotted an area of tiny dots over a circle 20mm across. They almost made it all the way around before, tired and sloppy, Easy got so punchy he glued one over-glove to the shroud and had to abandon it.

  When they were ready to cover the hatch itself and would leave only the coffin door bare in a strip near the edge, she stopped and looked. Easy wondered why she wasn't handing him wool. He turned and she pointed at the hatch and what they had not seen when they came out. In a large flourished script it was written – "So sorry they treated you badly - Don Adams from Ohio".

  "He said to look on the hatch," she reminded Easy. "I hope he didn't get in trouble for us." She made sure she took a permanent still of it with her suit camera and then when they were about to cover it up she said "wait," and she carefully unrolled a bigger matte of material and Easy understood. He touched the applicator carefully well to each side and they bridged it and preserved it.

  By the time they got back inside they were both shaky tired and desperate to use the toilet and for something to drink besides suit water. Once she was out of her suit, April announced modesty could be damned and she stripped her suit liner and washed as well as anyone can with a paper wet scrubber and unfolded a fresh liner to put on. She had never felt anything so wonderful in her life as being clean again. Easy did the same and he was remarkably casual about it which helped.

  He didn't stare at her and he didn't look away. She stared at him, because she had no idea what a collection of scars one human body could have. Then she was embarrassed and apologized for noticing. He reached over and touched hands in the zero G handshake manner. "We're soldiers. You don't worry about such things with your comrades. It's OK." And so she found she had joined a new fraternity she hadn't know about. Easy had a big square green tin of salve, with of all things, a cow and clover flowers on the lid. He offered it silently to her, as he applied it to all his joints and private areas. It smelled medicinal.

  The passengers were less comfortable, trying to ignore their strip and wash up, but they had brought out some self heating meals and apparently none of them were bothered enough by the zero G to not eat.

  "And these folks are not soldiers, I can tell you for sure." He said loud enough for everyone to hear and not especially friendly.

  April just looked surprised at him, because she could not imagine he intended to scold them about anything, after the shocks and uncertainty they faced.

  "If they were professional soldiers, they would not be eating in silence. They would be bitching and moaning between every bite, about being expected to eat this slop someone had the nerve to label as edible."

  "Uhmmm - yummie!" Eddie declared, faking a delighted face. "This has to be the best meal you can find, for thousands of kilometers in any direction."

  "Perhaps not yummie," Singh Nam-Kah allowed, looking at a piece of mystery meat in brown fluid. "But I'll take the company over what I left and a banquet of the finest."

  "Wait until I make you a curry dear," Singh said and touched the back of her hand gently. He got a warm smile in return.

  April had to pull her jaw back up from hanging open, before they noticed. Not that they were looking at her. They were gazing lovingly into each other's eyes. Obviously what she had heard was a quick marriage of convenience, had morphed into something else at double speed. It wouldn't have been such a shock, but Nam-Kah was a stunningly beautiful young woman, of certainly no more than thirty.

  Ajay though, was a widower in his forties, who looked like he had his boy cut his hair to save money and dressed in a style April was not familiar with, due to the lack of second hand and thrift stores on M3. Post Modern Refugee might describe it fairly well.

  "Would you like to split a meal?" Easy asked her. "It's not good to get too full when you might have to maneuver. We can do it before we do the burn and then we'll be free to get some sleep.

  "Sure, would you like the Sweet and Sour Chicken?" she asked, looking at the packet. "Or would you like the Pork Pattie and dumpling?"

  "It saves time to just ask if you want the Orange or the Grey," he explained.

  "Orange it is. Grey does not sound appetizing. What do you guys call the Beef and the Fish, like they're having?"

  "Uh - Brown and I'd rather not say. It's sort of vulgar."

  She looked at the fish again through the clear side and agreed. "It would have to be, wouldn't it?"

  April was happy they'd set up the burn before they went out. They were so tired she couldn't trust the numbers, so they were checking each other. They went through the check list and set the navigation computer for the burn. It would be a gentle shove and a long coast for now. They hoped the small burn with conventional engines would pass undetected. The last thing they did before it, was set the fusion reactors to shut down. They didn't need the neutrinos giving away their move. They had plenty in the accumulators to run for days.

  Despite the small acceleration, she cautioned the passengers, then Easy slapped the actuate square and they watch the numbers count down. When they came back to the decoy again, they would be doing six G, as they had climbing to high orbit. Easy agreed that was safe for the passengers, without a medical background on them. After they had moved off about twenty kilometers, they stopped their motion relative to their decoy with another small burp.

  "This is the Commander," Easy announced, with sudden formality. "We are dimming the cabin lights and having a sleep period until your Commander awakens. Anyone who makes noise and awakens your flight crew before we desire to be roused, will be required to finish the remaining stocks of Meals - Self-Heating - Fish Cakes. I hope I make myself clear."

  * * *

  Jon sat in his office considering all his options. He really missed having Eddie available. He wanted as complete a tight surveillance as he could put on Gary Chalmers and Eddie
was the one he normally depended on for undercover work. He commissioned Skip to plant a camera on the corridor watching their door, with an interrupt to display it to Skip or to Margaret on the off shift. She didn't like being given duty, a full shift off her normal hours, but he didn't have anyone to cover. So he let her work from home and do paper work for them, while she monitored. She sent her kids out to school, so it wasn't too hard for awhile.

  He looked at his organization chart on the white board. It was in four columns. Main-Shift, Fore-Shift, Off-Shift and Back-Shift. They all overlapped one to the next. There just weren't enough people to fit the slots. Especially with watching the incoming shuttles and counting off the outgoing people to match. He wasn't trusting the boarding database to be true. The Earthies might have a back door on the system. He wanted a match on every face.

  They received a fax inquiry about Easy and April from Interpol and then a separate one from USNA Homeland Security and the Chinese Institution of International Aviation. He also had one from France, from the Groupement d'Intervention de la Gendarmarie Nationale and wondered what their connection or gripe was. He would answer all as blandly as possible and for sure not tell them Local Control for M3 had hand delivered him a copy chip of the exchange between Easy and them, with Earthside Control on the line as he departed ISSII. He wished Easy had not spoken quite so plainly. He didn't see any spin he could put on it.

  He'd looked into Chalmer's work also. He tried the business number and got a recording saying they regretted they were not accepting new work at this time, but they would notify their mailing list when they were available again. He called up housing and got unofficially confirmed Chalmers was out of his business cubic two months ago and had cleaned all his equipment out, spotless enough to get his deposit back. He thought about it. It all had to go somewhere. There were only four places on M3 which offered storage for rent and two of them were just small lockers, one on the corridor next to the incoming shuttle dockage and next door to a place which sold hot slots to sleep in eight hour shifts. He'd bet on the one which had both inside and exterior storage, as Chalmers had to have some bulky items from a construction business, too expensive to store in spin and pressure. The expensive stuff would be in low G and the bulky stuff in zero G, maybe not even in pressure.