A Hop, Skip and a Jump (Family Law Book 4)

by Mackey Chandler

  "It's too late for them to launch a drone now. They've missed that opportunity," Frost said.

  "Might the frigate still launch one?" Lee asked Frost.

  "For another half hour or so, but I've never known a ship that small to carry a jump drone."

  "It would also have to follow us on a very close and converging vector to the same jump target. A drone could jump after us and overshoot us into the Sol system. One might mistake it for a missile launch," the XO, Wong suggested helpfully.

  "You need to learn not to smile like that when you play space lawyer," Gordon told him, "but thank you for the suggestion. We'll let it go if they launch one. It makes us look guilty to kill it. At this point it won't give them enough forewarning to arrange much of a reception."

  "Do we go ballistic on entry and refrain from braking until we have clearance to land or start braking as if we assume we'll get clearance?" Frost asked. "If they delay answering it will eat into our margins."

  "We will act as if we expect clearance. There should be no hint we made plans to pass right through. You can moderate the early burn to save Delta V if you wish. We might have maintenance or medical issues to explain that. Let me speak to traffic control when we enter," Lee decided. "I have a personal relationship with April that may tip the balance on our landing clearance."

  There were no further messages. The radar showed the picket vessel dropping its hard acceleration. That was likely a command decision rather than orders from the station given the lag between them now. They didn't release a drone or missile, though that would have been more an angry gesture than a danger.

  "Jump in a minute," Frost announced with relief.

  When the stars shifted slightly the one ahead was a bit closer than usual.

  "As you requested," Frost said, with a go ahead gesture at Lee.

  Lee cleared her throat, which wasn't her common mannerism and keyed her mic.

  "Luna Control, this is the Nation of Red Tree Destroyer Sharp Claws on a diplomatic mission, head of mission Lee Anderson speaking. We request clearance for a Solar orbit trailing approach outside the L1 limit. We seem to have some speed to bleed off," she said, like it was a sudden surprise. "Also we request you relay a message to the Sovereign of Central or her Voice asking landing clearance at the Sovereign's field, and an appointment at her pleasure. Recent system scan would be appreciated. Proposed burn started and attached. Advise if safety adjustments are necessary."

  "Nicely said. Not too pushy either," Gordon judged.

  "How long for a response?" Lee asked.

  "From the Moon? Sometime over three hours plus any delay while whoever is at Central decides what to do." Frost said.

  "My impression of April was that she doesn't sit around wringing her hands, or need to consult with others," Lee said. "I'd be very shocked if the other two in that partnership are much different. It doesn't sound like they need to worry what most others think."

  "Heh . . . The more I hear about these three, the more I think they sleep easy at night, and give others nightmares," Gordon said.

  "Sort of like you and the Fargoers," Frost said to Gordon.

  "Yes, but we solved that. I'm a Fargoer now. I think even the paranoids will finally admit we're on the same side and not a threat."

  "Maybe I can craft a similar solution with Central," Lee said hopefully. "Not citizenship." She said quickly at Frost's worried look, "but some agreement where we aren't going to allow ourselves to become enemies, that we have similar values and goals, and can at least stay out of each other's way where we can't work together."

  That seemed to satisfy Frost. He took his loyalty to his Mothers seriously.

  It was too early for their entry call to have even reached the Moon, much less a response arrive, when the radio came alive on the traffic control frequency.

  "Sharp Claws this is Ganymede Control. We were touched with your wave front a little earlier than Ceres so we are giving you this message that was prerecorded and held to be delivered on your arrival. You are cleared to land at Central's field, or the Sovereign's field at Armstrong if you wish access to the Republic while you are here. Lunar Control is instructed in advance to grant you priority passage. Please contact Lunar Control when you are approaching their nominal control volume. Central authorities will be advised the message was delivered."

  On the Sharp Claws bridge they all looked at each other in shock, not sure what to say, but Captain Frost recovered first and questioned them.

  "You mean Ceres would have delivered the message if we'd come in on a bit different vector? The message was pre-positioned all around? Do you have a date on that message?"

  It was still a significant delay until Ganymede answered, and they sat thinking about the implications of their arrival being anticipated.

  "Yes this message was copied to all outer system traffic centers for open delivery to Lee Anderson or any Nation of Red Tree vessel seeking a Central landing. It was propagated thirty two days ago, and had no date to expire."

  They looked at each other all around.

  "I feel like I'm playing out of my league here," Gordon said. "I very much dislike thinking I'm predictable.

  "That's because nobody else has been able to do it before. Be glad they still seem friendly," Lee said, "because I'd sure hate for them to be hostile and that far ahead of me. They were expecting us to arrive before I decided to leave." That seemed to rattle her.

  "Do they have a time machine?" Frost asked. He didn't seem to be joking.

  "I refuse to believe that," Gordon said. "They just have better information than we do."

  "Much better information," Lee agreed. "And all that planning what to do if we were denied landing clearance was wasted effort."

  "Never," Frost objected, shaking his head. "Preplanning for every scenario you can imagine is the lifeblood of operations. Nobody, not even Gordon, can just wing it real time. You have to just sit and imagine variation after variation to react as seamlessly as you do," He looked hard at Gordon like he expected him to challenge that.

  Gordon seemed surprised. "Well, I never had anybody ask how I do it, but you seem to have figured out most of it on your own. We have so many hours with absolutely nothing happening on the bridge. You have to think about something or go crazy. It might as well be something useful, playing endless 'what ifs' in your head. So, do you do the same thing?"

  "I can't get inside your head to know for sure. It might be qualitative, like when John Burris drives Ernie Goddard nuts by telling him some new idea is obvious. It isn't obvious to him no matter how smart Goddard is because they simply think in different patterns. But with you I suspect it's more quantitative," Frost said, pointing at his own head, "because your processors just examine more possibilities than mine can in the same time."

  "Sally complained to me how terribly boring it is watching the bridge operate," Lee said. "Little does she suspect that Gordon would have fought a hundred battles, and made a dozen landings in his head, while she was slowly dying because nothing was happening."

  "But she must be thinking about something," Gordon objected. "It's just impossible to sit and not think about anything. There's no off switch. It's like being told, 'Don't picture a yellow monkey,' then that's all you can think about trying to not think about it."

  "Sadly, I'm sorry to tell you that you're wrong," Frost said. "A great many people, Derf and Humans too, can easily sit and think about absolutely nothing at all. In fact it's a danger. They can get in such a null state that when something does happen it takes them a long time to rouse from their reverie and get the brain in gear to respond, if they're still alive to do so."

  Gordon looked unbelieving, and then glanced askance at Lee.

  "Yeah, he's got the right of it. It's that bad," Lee assured Gordon.

  "That doesn't make me feel superior at all," Gordon confessed. "It just scares me."

  What could you say to that?

  "You might as well file an altered seven tenths G approach," Gordon
decided. "That will stretch our approach to two full days, and we can adjust to their clock. No reason now to be uncomfortable and it's easy on Sally. But don't tell her I said that."

  "No, she'd want to wrestle you two falls out of three to redeem her honor," Lee said.

  * * *

  "Central or Armstrong field?" Frost asked them before he spoke to Luna Control. "Orbit and use our shuttle, or take the Sharp Claws down?"

  "Central," Lee said, with no hesitation. "We've never been there. I doubt many outsiders get invited to see the field, and I have no desire to give the Claims Commission guards at the Armstrong field another opportunity to hassle us. We don't have a Central escort to put the fear in them this time. Besides, what would we do in Armstrong? Go shopping? Are you comfortable landing her?"

  "In Lunar gravity? Yeah, no problem," Frost said. "It's easy enough to get around and access everything in the Sharp Claws at a sixth G, even though she's designed for zero G operations. On a heavy planet it would be awkward, but why separate some of our people, off in a shuttle, if we don't need to?"

  "That's sound tactics," Gordon agreed. "I suspect their private field is very secure."

  Lunar Control cleared them to orbit, but said, "Landing clearance assured for Central field," That was different and oddly phrased but clear. "Switch to field com on 872. You are now out of our control," they were informed.

  Frost pecked at his screen with a digit to switch to the non-standard frequency.

  "Nation of Red Tree vessel, Sharp Claws, requesting landing instructions," He said.

  "Sharp Claws, Central Control here." It was an unusually deep female voice with an accent Lee had never heard before. "The Luna Positioning System uses normal GPS standards. I'm sending your pad coordinates to your screen, and a standard landing beacon is also active if you wish to do an automated landing. You are directed to pad number eight. We are in lunar night but strong earth glow. The pad will be illuminated along the edge and marked with an 8 if you wish to do a visual landing. There is no other traffic, land at your convenience."

  "Thank you Central Control. We are descending on your automated beacon."

  The autopilot briefly bumped them up past the seven tenths G they'd been maintaining and then started dropping. The gentle deceleration allowed them to hang an arm out with a camera to view their decent. There was an indistinct blur of light coming up. When they rotated to a more vertical approach the blur resolved to a glowing blue square. The was a large 8, also in bright blue, in the middle of the square. There weren't any buildings or surface features to be seen. As they got very close they could see the faint outlines of neighboring squares, and a road running between them. The blue finally resolved into individual lights at only a couple hundred meters altitude. The autopilot dropped them with much smoother throttle control than any pilot could achieve. When they touched the ship barely compressed the landing jack shocks, and they felt the slightest rebound.

  "And we're down," Frost said. Lee wasn't sure if that was to them or the still open mic. Frost touched the screen a few places and switched to a side view camera.

  "The landing pad is bigger than I expected," Frost said. "It looks to be somewhere around eighty meters on a side." Beyond the pad lights, the Lunar surface was the grey of regolith in the very faint Earth shine. The marble of the mostly sun lit planet was hanging there in the camera view. The scene was enhanced because the camera boosted its sensitivity for the dark scene.

  "Please do not exit immediately," the same rich voice requested nicely.

  There was a slight shudder and outside a black band appeared around the entire square and started climbing. They all looked at it, not understanding. Then it hit Lee.

  "Oh m' God, it's an elevator. We're seeing the shaft wall rise around us."

  "I thought they built little ships. What do they need with an elevator eighty meters square? And we're a hundred and twenty eight meters long, plus some for the landing jacks. Their hanger will clear us?" Gordon worried.

  The opening overhead disappeared from their camera view. After they were still dropping after a couple minutes Captain Frost activated a camera looking forward from the nose. The opening was still visible as a small square of star studded black framed in utter black.

  When Frost turned on a side flood they could see faint patterns in the elevator shaft walls. Also a gear rack on side of the platform corners. A recessed slot looked to have both finer pitch racks for a man elevator and an old fashioned access ladder with flat rungs standing off the slot wall with stanchions every meter or so.

  Frost tapped his screen. "We've been dropping over six minutes. How deep do you think we'll go?"

  "It looked to me like we were dropping a couple meters a second," Lee said. "Check the LGS log. It should have got a reading for how fast we were descending before we dropped out of sight of the satellites."

  Frost nodded. "Yep, a very smooth ramp up and then a steady 3.2 meters per second."

  After a few more minutes they watch an opening into an artificial cavern slide into view. "Call it a kilometer and a half to the floor level coming up." Frost estimated. The hanger was illuminated by indirect floods on the walls. The floor was clear for a couple hundred meters straight back, but ships were set back slightly in separate alcoves, three to each side with the overhead forming huge ribs between the bays. Only two to the right, and one to the left, being occupied.

  "Did I say their field would be secure?" Gordon asked. "I had no idea."

  They slowed, but still the platform on which they sat dropped past the hanger floor. Lee thought they were going to go deeper, but then it stopped and rose slowly. When it matched edge to edge from below there was a deep clunk of latches engaging.

  "How interesting," the XO Wong remarked. "They don't trust the active system to hold us. When they stop it engages positive latches."

  "Probably big servo motors, engaging those racks in each corner," Frost speculated. "Simple and direct, but they still don't trust it."

  "If they don't want it plunging down the shaft, how deep does it go?" Lee asked.

  "I'm betting this is just a sort of ready room," Gordon guessed. "Where you park when you're just making a brief visit and don't want to put it in long-term deep storage."

  "So the really secure hanger is below, who knows how deep?" Lee speculated.

  They slowly slid off the platform, down the middle of the hanger. There were no rails visible but the stage they were on went straight and felt solid.

  "Look at those two!" Lee said. The ships on their right were a real contrast. One was tiny, barely seven meters long and so slim it might not allow side by side seating. The other was squat in form, but towered above them. There was activity around it. It had a winged shuttle clinging to its side bigger than the other tiny ship. The landing jacks were massive with large flat end shoes, and articulated so they could be folded in closer at present, the knees folded up to tuck the end pads within the square like the one they were riding on. Towards the front, where the body started to taper in, were two knobby projections like frog eyes, with big black dots like pupils, obviously made to allow them to swivel.

  "Those turrets on the big one . . . " Lee said, unwilling to voice her conclusions.

  "Energy weapon mounts," Frost said, confidently.

  "But the aperture must be over a meter," Lee objected. "New Japan Greasers top out at twenty millimeters and you have to divert full power to drive one."

  "Uh huh," Frost agreed.

  "Why are you smiling?" Lee asked Gordon.

  "I was thinking of the Bunny planet we visited. They've been digging an artificial pass through that big mountain range for thousands of years, and still have thousands to go to get it down the level of the plains on each side. I bet one of those suckers could cut it down for them in a couple days. Just orbit and lay a beam end to end each pass."

  "Probably," Frost agreed. "However the rock dust plume condensing downwind would devastate the eastern portion of the continent. It woul
d be like a volcanic eruption. And it might throw dust high enough in the atmosphere to cool the climate for years." He looked thoughtful. "But it would make a spectacular video."

  "Here we go, end parking spot," Lee said, as the creeping plate stopped and then moved sideways into the last alcove without turning.

  The screen showed an icon for video received and Frost keyed an acceptance. The lady was the same who spoke before, her voice was unmistakable. Lee was fascinated with her appearance. She had on a long flowing dress, of gauzy material with elaborate printing, and a lot of jewelry that didn't look like it was the costume sort.

  "My apologies, nobody anticipated a small problem we've encountered. Our system is not compatible with Earth Human lock standards. We can't extend a pressurized transfer tube and let you access public pressure directly from your vessel. An adaptor has been commissioned and a fabricating shop will have it created in a few hours, but at the moment you must either wait for that or wear one of your own pressure suits to transfer."

  "That's no hardship," Gordon assured her. We'd have expected to do that at Armstrong."

  "I'll send a cart then, which will bring you to a hospitality suite, when you feel ready to disembark. Just let me know on this channel."

  "Give us ten or fifteen minutes. There will be five of us. The crew can stay aboard. We've had a long day on the flight deck, and will need to sleep before we're fit company," Gordon said. "We're pretty well synced to your day shift if I understand correctly. We did about a six hour shift to get on the same clock. Another night should see us feeling no disruption at all. I know we could take some medication, but I've never felt that is as effective as just adapting"

  "Before you go!" Lee spoke up quickly, "Can you arrange a private audience with April or whoever is speaking for the Sovereign at the moment?"

  "The Sovereign Heather is in residence at the moment. Allow me to ask her private secretary," the lady offered. The screen briefly switched to a hold screen view of a public shopping district from an elevated view. It was a sealed mall and Lee suspected it was in Armstrong. There were benches and planters down the middle as well as a couple small fountains. The only motorized transport visible was a few open carts, not much faster than the pedestrians. Then she was back.