April 6: And What Goes Around

by Mackey Chandler

  "Has the flight crew come through?" Jon asked, rubbing his face still half asleep.

  "No, I thought he might be crew when he was hanging back, then it clicked he was moving wrong for crew," Margaret said.

  "Then I'm calling traffic control and having them put on a hold. We'll run down the people you've admitted and give them the option to board and return to ISSII if they don't want to be put in isolation. What do you need there right now?" Jon asked.

  "A bubble stretcher and two or more guys in isolation suits to cuff him and stuff him in it. I don't want to approach him with no suit, so have them rub his hand on a DNA reader," Margaret requested.

  "Thanks, I'll call Doc Lee and tell him he has another patient to go in isolation. I'll make that a transfer ball, not just a stretcher, so they can take him directly into quarantine," Jon said.

  "How did he get aboard at ISSII, past our man at the gate?" Margaret asked.

  "I don't know. But we're going to have a hard talk with the flight crew and demand they answer questions under truth processing or I'll blacklist them from having docking rights at Home," Jon said.

  "The fellow I Tasered is drifting toward the bearing. It would be nice if they get here and pop him in the capsule before the air currents take him through and contaminate the hub too," Margaret added.

  "You had it on stun I take it? Or you'd be telling me to bring a body bag," Jon asked.

  "Yeah, but I haven't gone over to check his vitals and I'm not going to." Margaret informed him. "I have no desire to get infected with that crud."

  "The guys are in the elevator already coming up to get him," Jon said. "That should be fine. They'll decontaminate that side of the bearing after you are all out."

  "Thank you Jon. Sorry to wake you up," Margaret apologized.

  "You did exactly right," Jon assured her. "I should have told you 'Good Job' already. I don't think we need to isolate you given the level of exposure, but I'm going to talk to Doc Lee and see. You may have to take a day off and check your saliva every few hours three or four days from now. He said the virus will show on a reader if you are becoming contagious before you feel anything.

  "So that's how you get a day off around here," Margaret said.

  * * *

  "How accurately are the engines spaced out around the Yuki-onna?" Deloris asked Barak.

  "I helped Harold do the survey work. I've never done it before myself, and he wasn't the best about explaining what he was doing. It was more like – Stand here and hold this, no, straight away from the surface not on an angle. But I watched and most of it made sense. He had to get them spaced out but in the same plane. The plane is set at right angles to a line through the snow ball's center of mass. We got that pretty accurately because it has enough gravity to pull a plumb bob straight, if you are patient.

  "When he had me make the final corrections they were only about twenty centimeter moves, so I figure everything is located at least that accurately in each of three dimensions. So double that tolerance between any two. I'd mark the ice with spray dye and we got each engine manhandled onto the mark within fifty centimeters or so. Add up the variables and they should be within three hundred centimeters engine to engine on opposite sides."

  "I hope you're right," Deloris said. "The guys back on Home are saying we may have to do an extra correction or two if they aren't within a meter of where they are supposed to be."

  "What if we do?" Barak asked her. "We have the time and can do extra if we need to."

  "I guess they are still counting the expense. We'll be running late to get back as it is."

  "You mean they'll only be rich instead of filthy rich?" Barak joked.

  "Yeah, I think you have that right, but let's not tell them that bluntly while we are depending on them for our bonuses and survival," Deloris said. "It might sound ungrateful to them. Coming up on the burn," she warned.

  "Ready and tired of waiting," said Alice from the jump seat.

  The counter in the screen reached zero and the board showed two adjacent engines firing at thirty percent, but they couldn't feel it. The attitude display showed a slow roll from the off-center firing after almost ten minutes. The engines cut off after twenty minutes and then they waited exactly twenty-three minutes letting it roll and fired the opposite pair of engines to bring the rolling motion back to a halt in a bit over an hour. They had imparted a slight forward velocity as well as rotating the snowball.

  "I'm aligning the star sighting system," Deloris said. It was the first she sounded stressed to Barak. "If it's anywhere near where they want it pointed we'll do a slow ramp up and burn on all engines and enough on Yuki-onna to keep us pushed in the ice."

  After a few minutes Deloris said, "We're within a half degree. That's better than they hoped for. It'll do an auto burn in seven minutes if I don't interrupt it. I'm sending them the data but we'll be burning well before they receive it. They wanted us to wait and get confirmation but I argued against it. We aren't total idiots and can read the attitude numbers and compare them just fine. Why wait?"

  When the engines all fired this time they followed it on the boards. They took a couple minutes to ramp up to thirty percent power and the sound of the Yuki-onna's engines in the hull was much more apparent than any sound through the ice. Even at low power.

  "Doesn't exactly press you back in your seat, does it?" Barak said.

  Deloris allowed it wasn't about to, even when they went to eighty percent power later, pushing tonnage she described in unusually vulgar terms. That was the only sign she displayed of the tension of her new responsibilities. As far as Barak was concerned she could name her tons any way she pleased with the burden of command on her shoulders.

  "I'll do the first twelve hour watch," Deloris said. "If something goes wrong the engines should all shut down automatically. But if it doesn't that's why we're sitting watching it. You can listen to music if you wish on speakers, but no headphones and I'll check on you a few times to see if you're having trouble staying alert. If you feel sleepy dial down the temperature and configure the seat like a bench to sit up instead of leaning back on it. If you are struggling keep setting a count-down alarm on your pad. Any questions?"

  "When we do the longer burns maybe we should do six hour shifts. Think about it," Barak said.

  "Can you still get good sleep in shorter shifts?" Deloris asked.

  "I don't know. Twelve hours is just so long to sit a watch. Maybe you can ask them on Home what has proved optimum," Barak suggested.

  "That's a good idea. Somebody has probably done studies about it," Deloris said. "I'll see you back here at 1400. Alice, if you can manage to split your shift and see both of us when we are alternating it would be a comfort to not be alone so long."

  "I'd be happy to," Alice agreed, "and I can bring stuff to the bridge and have a meal with each of you during your shifts."

  "Thanks, Alice. See you mid-shift. Barak, be sure to get your rest," Deloris said, but she was looking at Alice. Barak wasn't sure exactly what the message to Alice was. Alice had no questions and seemed to know what she meant. Undoubtedly it would be much worse for him if they were at odds with each other instead of happily conspiring, but sometimes he felt helpless having two women running his life for him.

  * * *

  "We ran ten samples from widely scattered areas," Mo reported. "We got a lot more methane than I expected. Carbon dioxide and monoxide were all over the place. One sample at seventy two parts per million and another at three hundred eleven parts per million. It'll average out to be worth doing though I think. I wouldn't stop backfilling. Just keep backfilling and build the extractors along the edge as we can. We wouldn't save enough volume by stopping to make any difference. It's not like we don't have much more regolith within easy reach if we backfill the whole thing and still need carbon."

  "Is the crater going to fill back up with the displaced rock and regolith or is it going to mound up?" Heather asked, drawing a hump in the air with her hand. "Will we need to tamp
it down somehow or keep adding material as it settles?"

  "Without air or water to hold the particles apart or draw them together it will compact back to near the same volume. The only question I have is if it will be strong enough to attach the beanstalk Jeff wants to build. You'll have to ask somebody who knows foundations and anchors."

  "What is the worst case scenario on that?" Heather asked.

  "He might have to run his cable all the way to bedrock," Mo said. "Maybe five hundred meters. Or Jeff might move the beanstalk off a few kilometers. Then it would go up at a little angle, but probably not enough to even see by eye. It is going to oscillate a little with the gravitational variations anyway."

  "That's really not so bad. It's going to be so long a half kilometer on one end isn't any big deal. But you do know most of a beanstalk will be carbon don't you?" Heather asked.

  "I'm aware of that and I'm not at all sure how many thousands of square kilometers we'd have to mine and convert to bucky to build one. If you want to do it in your lifetime you better get another source of carbon. Unless we find a big surprise somewhere that means importing it," Mo said.

  "I'll keep that in mind. I'm more interested right now in when you'll have enough carbon dioxide to fill a tunnel to start increasing our seed stocks," Heather said.

  Mo made a show of looking thoughtful. "I will have two hand-built extraction machines running in two weeks. Unless there is a major design problem in another week after that I'll have around ten kilograms of carbon for you, which will make about thirty-four or thirty-five kilograms of carbon dioxide. You can start plants with just a couple hundred parts per million carbon dioxide and the optimum is a thousand to twelve hundred ppm. So you can have a small tunnel filled to start some seeds in three weeks.

  "I'll cycle the batch process faster the first couple weeks to get a stock even if it wastes some gas, but then pump down closer to a vacuum to increase yield as we add machines. We'll hand-build a new extractor a week and get ahead of you. In a couple months, I'll have an automated machine designed to build small extractors from what we've learned on the early hand built machines. You can put the people to other work then, and you'll have to stop building them when they ring the crater or send them off to mine other areas. Maybe a dark crater like we said."

  "Are you going to be able to store it OK if we get behind on tunnels?" Heather asked.

  "Oh sure. We can sinter steel tanks and store it as liquid. If we mine it in a dark crater we can store it as liquid in much thinner tanks at lower pressures or even as a solid in permanent shadow," Mo assured her. "When we have a large amount of biomass from the plants we can set it aside and store it as cellulose, starch, sugar or even reduce it to pure carbon. In a few months I think we'll be ahead of how much you can use for food and we'll be selling it."

  "Oh! For some reason I wasn't thinking of selling it. I was stuck mentally on just using it," Heather said. "That's great. We need exports. Perhaps we can export it as food."

  "It might only be a temporary market if we get lots of carbon from the outer system, but for a few years we can make a bit of money from it or trade with it," Mo said, looking pleased.

  "I'll talk to Jeff about marketing it, and see if he's going to need carbon to do prototype work for the beanstalk," Heather promised.

  * * *

  "Five passengers opted to return to ISSII rather than go into isolation," Jon said. "The trouble is now they won't take them back. They are sitting in the shuttle waiting for us to sort it out. This is ridiculous. They are no more at risk than the other people they are taking in from Earth and other habs who are displaying no symptoms."

  "Except they do know these had at least some exposure in the same cabin," Doc Lee said. "What are you going to do?"

  "I'll let them enter again as long as they don't argue about going in isolation for at least four days. I don't wish us to be the ones who appear unreasonable or keep these people uncomfortable and imprisoned on their shuttle. The owner reasonably wants his shuttle back to use too. We have the room in hotels and they should be cleared as flu free before we get a new batch," Jon said.

  "How did we get these? That is, how did the infected fellow not get tested?" Lee asked.

  "He works for the owner of that hull and was getting a courtesy ride so they let him aboard before official boarding time," Jon said. "Our paid guy showed up before they opened the hatch to the public, but the sick guy was already in the shuttle."

  "Well you can hardly blame him for not having a continuous stakeout on the dock. He isn't getting paid enough for that," Lee concluded.

  "No," Jon agreed, "Even if we had our own man there he wouldn't have caught this one. What about the fellow in quarantine? What can you tell me about him?"

  "Oh he has the flu alright," Lee said, "he tested positive right away, but it's the H3N2 variety."

  "It isn't the new stuff?" Jon asked, surprised.

  "Nope. You know, all the old seasonal varieties are still out there in the wild. We have yet to see if this one will become a fixture or burn completely out. We still don't want H3N2 sweeping through the station," Lee assured him. "The flu shot this year didn't include it. Before this new mouse based flu showed up everybody was guessing on a variety of H1N1 for the season."

  "Why did this fellow run?" Jon wondered. "Didn't he get tested on ISSII and know it was the plain old seasonal variety?"

  "No. He saw lots of people getting sick on ISSII and decided to bug out. He didn't feel sick when he left. In fact he wasn't aware he had it yet when Margaret stunned him. He said zero G always makes him feel out of sorts and stuffed up so he didn't think anything of it. The good thing about that for him is we got him on anti-virals early in his infection when they work best," Lee said.

  "You do know we're being blamed for starting this flu in a lot of the news outlets?" Jon asked.

  "I do. It's insane on the face of it," Lee said. "We have the most to lose. But people believe what they want to believe in the face of all logic or evidence. That's a component of what people are calling Earth Think. I hope we don't lose the ability to see that or replace it with our own Home Think now that immigration is less restricted than in the past."

  Lee's face lit up with a sudden thought. "If you find the source of those rumors I suspect you will know who really released this virus on the world."

  Jon said nothing but looked thoughtful.

  Chapter 18

  "The situation in the big cities has gotten really bad," Jeff said. "The EMS, police, and fire departments have run out of fuel to respond. Some places the crazy people destroyed the vehicles when they did go out. The hospitals are out of supplies and room. There are fires in a few big cities that nobody is putting out. The military have withdrawn to their bases and sealed up mostly. People stopped reporting for work when they knew there was little they could do and they are taking care of their own families.

  "Banks have one by one stopped updating accounts and crediting people with their pay when their IT people stayed home and systems failed. If they aren't getting paid and their cards stop working people have little reason to go to work. The cash dispensers ran out of money and few of them have been refilled. A lot of shops are closed or won't take cash anyway. A lot of shops stopped taking cash and post it right on the door so robbers know there isn't any money to steal. The government encouraged that for more tax receipts since it's much harder to hide receipts.

  "No few stores have been looted and burned in the worst areas, but people want food and medicine, not big screen displays and com pads. The police stayed on the job and kept the lid on long enough that the places with food and drugs were empty by the time people got desperate enough to loot them.

  "It's a mess and traffic out on the highways between cities is way down. The only bright spot I can see is they didn't have a mass exodus from the cities into the countryside. That would have stalled when everybody ran out of fuel and most cars don't have the range they did even ten years ago. North America and Europe are
in winter and thousands would have frozen to death when they couldn't reach safety or find enough fuel to make it back home. By the time most wanted to leave they heard from friends and online that it was just as bad everywhere else. The official news sources kept saying everything was fine. The lying is blatant to the point that convinced most people everything was exactly the opposite."

  "That's pretty much what my people tell me. Some places are losing electric or water if the local staff happens to be hard hit. Thankfully a lot of the machinery is robust enough to keep working for a time without maintenance. But there are still places with power line up on poles where a storm can damage them. The fusion power stations last best. The situation is a little easier in the tropics or in the Southern Hemisphere where it is summer," Jeff told Jon.

  "I wish we had more assets on the ground. I can trust nothing that is said on the news services."

  "I, we, still have some agents in contact and we have been supporting them," Jeff revealed.

  "How? Why should they still work for you in that chaos?" Jon asked. "They aren't getting paid."

  "You know the mission we sent to Tonga," Jeff reminded him. "It seemed a failure but we still got the flu data. Well, the agents ingratiated themselves to a taxi driver on their way to the hotel. They gave him a gold ring and he used it very wisely to prepare for the pandemic hitting the island.

  "When they got in their hotel room they hid a cache of gold rings and other things in a lighting fixture, not wanting to carry it all around. We contacted the driver and asked him to continue working for us. He was quite agreeable. I suspect there isn't much work of any kind right now but survival scavenging. We told him what room to rent at the hotel and he recovered the rings. He's our eyes and ears there now, and he managed to contact one of Mitsubishi's people and manage him for us."

  "How did you get in contact with him with no agents there?" Jon demanded.

  "Why, we just called him on his cell phone. Many areas with solar backup power on the towers still have cell service," Jeff said.