"If we needed help their emergency number is 112 just like ours in North America is 911. I can't believe they don't have somebody in the call center that speaks English. Did you hit on that cute young woman that received us the other day and get on her bad side?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
"Try me."
"She took an instant dislike to me, because I speak better French than her."
"You're right, Fredrick agreed. "I don't believe you."
* * *
"Let's just sit and talk a bit, I'll tell you about myself and then you can tell me about you. I'm Faye Lewis. My husband manages the actual physical habitat for Mitsubishi. My father was one of the men who came up and built M3. He already had saved back quite a bit of money from his work and investments, so when they had the auction to sell off some of the cubic after the hab was done, he had enough to buy a pretty large compartment in the full G section for us to live and a compartment in the zero G North Hub too."
"Is M3 the same as Home?" Lindsy asked.
"Almost. M3 is the habitat owned by Mitsubishi. Owned by the North American subsidiary that is. M1 and M2 were built by the Japanese branch of the company. When they were done they were run under Japanese law. If you go over and visit them they have no English signs in the corridors like here. and they don't have all that much traffic with the other habitats. Not just here, but the rest of them too. Both are pretty industrial and they haven't done anything to encourage tourism. In fact neither has a hotel, so if you would insist on flying over to one they don't make it easy to stay overnight. Home is the political unit, the country. The folks here were smart enough to see stealing the physical habitat would work against their independence. You might say we are a country without any real territory, but it has worked to make Japan our ally instead of enemy."
"They sound anti-social," Lindsy decided. "Prejudiced too," she decided after a pause.
"Xenophobic is a very accurate word for that," Faye taught her. "The Japanese do keep their culture isolated. If you live in Japan you are always an outsider. If you have children after you have lived in Japan thirty years, they are still foreigners to them."
"You can be born there and you aren't a citizen?"
"Exactly. and we only have a hundred or so Japanese here most of the time. They consider it a hardship post to live here. But back to my father. He was saving and bought this big apartment for a reason. It was his long term goal to get us all off Earth. So when he had the room for us, we were anticipating it and we left California and joined him. By that time I had a child, Bob, my boy, who was two when we came up. I had been working as a teacher in California and had to quit that. There was no need for teachers here. There was one other child on the hab when we arrived. I worked at other things, secretarial, lab work, inventory for construction supplies. I had my second child April, who is about your age now and after her my husband was in his present job and doing well, so I didn't work as often. Later when there were more children I started getting back into education. I did tutoring and formed a local education association. It's only now that we have enough children on Home that I think we can support a private school."
"I'm pretty sure I know who your girl April is. Doesn't she wear mostly black and she has kind of a fashion following?
"She has been shown a great deal in the Earth media, yes. But she doesn't promote herself that way, or try to cash in on the fashion industry. I avoid mentioning it to her, because it just irritates her. She'll grumble something to the effect that they should get a life of their own."
"I saw a pic of her recently, but she wasn't in black leather and ballistic cloth. She was in a club wearing something slinky and expensive and a bunch of jewelry that looked like a million bucks," Lindsy enthused.
"Good, I'm delighted she is branching out."
"You didn't see her dressed like that?"
"April is emancipated. She's a legal adult on Home. She has a room still in our cubic, but it is separate and has its own bath. We come and go and often don't see each other, or just say hi when one of us passes through the main room. She recently bought a section of residential cubic at half G, so I anticipate I'll see her even less."
"How does this emancipation thing work?" Lindsy asked, very, very interested.
* * *
All the security pros were having breakfast together, as they did frequently. "We have a gig for a crew of four over on New Las Vegas, if two of you want to come with us," Mackay and Holt offered to the group.
"It seems unhealthy for us to go to a USNA territory hab," Isaac spoke up for himself and his partner Eric. "I'm supposedly dead, but I'm not ready to test that, or the transit rights of being a Home citizen. Thanks anyway."
"USNA territory is dicey for me too," Otis Dugan declined.
"We are both Home citizens now," Mackay pointed out, "and since so much work involves at least transiting USNA territory we are determined to test our transit rights and insist on them."
"Best to test it armed to the teeth and in a mob of armed friends," Otis agreed.
"Chen? – Gunny?"
"How many days?" Chen inquired.
"Three full days and parts of two. The guy is Toni Buscemi, a Chicago business man. Read that Mafia boss. He wants to gamble and live it up, I imagine far away enough from home not to be a spectacle and safer too," he speculated.
"April keeps telling me I'm free to ask for time off, but I worry something will happen in my absence," Gunny fretted.
"I'm stuck here. I'll keep an eye on her for you," Brockman promised.
"Got nothing else to do then," Gunny said, his usual brief self. "Chen it's been two weeks, did your modification plateau out yet?"
"Try it and find out."
Gunny shifted his weight a little like he was drawing. It was just a feint. Chen drew a small automatic, but by the time he had it slightly above the edge of the table Gunny had a full sized pistol extended at arm's length, finger safely laid outside the trigger guard and pointed harmlessly a couple centimeters to the side of Chen's ear. The hammer however was not back, in the interests of safety.
"Damn, you are not human!" Chen exclaimed disgusted. "You are so fast now, what would you be like if you got the treatment?"
"If it ain't broke, don't fix it," Gunny quoted Yankee wisdom. "It might just as well mess things up and slow me down, I suspect. You are faster than ninety-nine point nine percent of the people now. Be happy with that, but stay aware there might be somebody faster than you."
"You keep reminding me," Chen grumbled.
"Keeps you humble," Gunny agreed.
Chapter 22
"What about you?" Fay asked Lindsy. "What was your life like before you came to Home and what do you want to learn and do here?"
"My life has been boring. I'm not allowed to go anywhere with friends. I can't pick what I wear or use make-up. I have my com pad looked at every few days by my mom and she flies in a tizzy if anything I've said is true."
"Give me an example of this campaign against truth," Faye asked, dubious.
"Oh, if I say anything about my teachers. Sorry, you seem to be an actual human being, but some of the teachers they gave me… They seem to have the soul sucked out of them before they are allowed to teach. If you ask a question they don't know the answer, then you are a trouble maker and if you question the correctness of something they did say, they go ballistic."
"Ah, I see."
"Do you really?" Lindsy asked skeptically. "Or do you want me to pretend everything is just fine, joy, joy and not make waves like everybody else?"
"I'm here," Faye said, putting her tea mug down in front of her. "You are over here," she said, taking Lindsy's mug out of her hand planting it on the table in front of her. "Your mom is over here," she said pulling an empty mug from the rack and positioning it well to the side.
"From over here, I can see what motivates you," she said pointing at Lindsy's mug, "and I can see what motivates her," she said waving at the empty
mug. "I'm detached enough not to be totally invested in either of you. I'd like to have you as a student, which could give me some satisfaction and I'd like to take your mom's money, because that's what other reward you get from a business. But neither is strong enough motivation to play the ugly game you all had to play on Earth," she explained, with a dark look.
"Here, I am a private school and business. I want to make my student's parents happy, but only within the limits of accomplishing the goals we agree on. Neither the parents nor Home can tell me what to do. If I don't like what your parents demand I can tell them to take their little darling back and educate him or her themselves. I don't need the school or the income to survive. If my student is a horrible abrasive person, who makes me or the other students unhappy and doesn't want to be in my school, I'll send them home. It doesn't matter if the parents want them here, I'm running a school not a prison. The public schools you went to had to accept basically every student who lived in their district. I don't."
"If the Home Assembly tried to tell me how to run my school, or that I had to indoctrinate patriotism in my students, I'd tell them to go to hell and inform my family we need a second revolution already."
That rattled Lindsy. At home a teacher who used that dirty word would be suspended. One who repeated it could be fired. and besides revolution she'd said hell…
"So if I don't want to be here I can go home? Lindsy asked, unbelieving still.
"Not only that. I'd refund all your Mom's money. It's stupid to make anyone unhappy with you so early in starting up a business. In a small community that matters a lot."
"At home if I skipped a day they would arrest me, if the cops saw me out on the street. I'd never get in the mall, or on a bus, but security or the volunteer snoops would call the cops. and then they'd fine my folks for my truancy."
"I suspect you are finding it hard to believe, but Home is not North America. I assume you have never been to another country before?"
Lindsy shook her head no. Not seeing the point yet.
"Maybe if we spoke a different language and wore weird clothes it would be easier to believe we really are different," Faye speculated. "We have almost no laws. If your mom decides to home school you, or your brother, nobody is going to come by and stick their nose in her business. Nobody will demand you take standardized state tests. There are no Social Services or Family Court."
"What if I think one of your tutors is stupid?" Lindsy asked. Always ready to provoke.
"I'd be shocked. Boring, irritating, repulsive, or even just on a completely different wavelength than you maybe, but none of them have tutored for private fees, where they can be dismissed at will, by being stupid. If one drives you bonkers sucking on his teeth or tapping his foot on the deck I'd encourage you to rise above letting petty issues distract you. We all need a certain level of socialization. None of us can run amok down the corridors eliminating all the folks we find irritating, no matter how attractive it is on occasion. You can always kindly tell them what they are doing irritates you."
"But if you are really a bad match and their style of instruction just isn't helping you I'd dismiss them and see who else we could get. It happens. There are a very few subjects so exotic that only one person tutors them. I believe Ms. Hoarsh is the only one who teaches fine furniture making and Jonathan Truboni is the only one who teaches saber, but I somehow can't see you taking up either," Faye joked.
"Saber?" Lindsy asked dubiously. "Is that some kind of software?"
Faye drew an invisible saber, cocking her wrist convincingly at the end and swirled a horizontal moulinette, ending with her elbow bent vertically looming over Lindsy. You could almost see the glint off the blade it was so convincing.
"That's what I thought you meant. Not my thing."
"Yet it is offered at many Earth universities and is an Olympic sport."
"Are you going to contact my old school and get my transcript and grades? Lindsy asked. 'Are you?' was definitely a step closer to yes, than 'would you?'
"Lindsy honey, my opinion of the public schools Earthside is so low, I don't see any point in it. I trust neither their system or their motives. Figure you start fresh up here."
Lindsy leaned back and actually relaxed a little. Maybe she'd try it a few days. After all if it was horrible she could go home. She'd told her she could. There would be hell to pay with her mom of course, but they couldn't throw her in jail for it, she realized now.
"What day do you want me to come back?" she agreed.
* * *
Mo was demonstrating the difference between professionals and amateurs to Jeff daily. There were all sorts of potential pitfalls he's prevented them from building into their entries and foundations. He had lots of good ideas on how tunnels should be shaped and how you terminate them and change direction so a shock wave doesn't propagate. He demonstrated how to fuse multiple layer of regolithic glass one on top of another with wire acting like rebar to bind them together and extend the melt zone to build a monolithic whole.
Right now they were examining the 'bricks' that were removed from tunneling and flung to a stockpile by a catapult Jeff had designed. The bricks were breaking up. He eventually intended to use then as a counterweight on a beanstalk extended toward L1, so their busting into odd lengths would complicate sending them up the beanstalk sometime in the future.
"See?" Mo pointed at several fractured bricks in a high speed photo of them leaving the catapult. "They are breaking up from acceleration when you toss them. They might not break up near as much landing. We'd have to get them to fling intact, to find out."
"I'm sure if we stacked them carefully in the catapult bucket they'd be OK," Jeff said, "but it's way too labor intensive. It will be bad enough if we have to skid them up by hand once, to go up the elevator."
"Have you ever taken an old shotgun shell apart?"
"I've never fired a shotgun," Jeff told him, "you don't see many."
"The old style shot, lead balls, are really soft. To the point they all get squished flat if you just shoot it with them poured bare in the cup that sits on top of the powder."
"This has something to do with us?"
"Oh yeah. You pour some buffer in that is a powder of little plastic beads. It supports the balls enough they don't squish each other under acceleration."
"Ah, but we don't have much plastic handy,"
"I'm betting if you just load the catapult bucket up with enough regolith it will buffer. and in the absence of any air it should all be together at the other end when it lands, to help significantly there too."
"Well, it's cheap enough to test."
"That's a three percent breakage instead of about twenty-five," Jeff said later, after they dug into the new layer and counted. "I'd call that a success."
* * *
"Did you know that you can live in Japan for years and if you have a baby there they still don't consider them a citizen? Lindsy asked her mom. "I think they are xenophobic and just a little full of themselves," she said indignantly.
Linda looked at her daughter like a Robin wondering if it had somehow missed a cowbird egg in its nest. Lindsy never came home from school in Canada and started babbling about Japanese xenophobia and citizenship. In fact she seldom wanted to talk about anything. Maybe that school was worth three hundred dollars a day.
* * *
"Mr. Buscemi," as lead on the job Mackay acknowledged his client with a polite nod at the lock, but he didn't offer his hand. Perhaps because he didn't care to extend more than professional courtesy, or perhaps because he had both hands full of tangle gun. He had a lethal black Air-Taser cross draw on his left hip and a full sized Sig on the right side. Next to the Taser was an outsized Arkansas toothpick with an ornate silver wire wound grip. Full face spex wrapped around his face with a thin mic boom.
Buscemi had four associates crowded behind dressed almost as nicely as him. They were all large, swarthy, visibly fit and couldn't hide the fact that Mackay and Holt surprised them by bei
ng in casual clothing, Mackay in khakis and a nice Cutter and Buck shirt and Holt in jeans and a sweater instead of suits, but with full tactical armor vest and spex.
The younger man had the same Taser and pistol combo and you could see the faint glow of a targeting grid reflected off the inside of the spex on his face. He wore a thin pack on his back that looked like a camelback, but a black nozzle projecting over each shoulder tracked where his eyes roamed. The nozzles didn't dispense sports drink. If that wasn't enough he carried an auto-loading shotgun with a double row powered magazine.
"I hired you guys because I understood you could carry locally and there was no way I could get the Feds to allow my boys to carry on transport," he explained. "I just didn't realized you'd be so blatant," he admitted, rattled.
"We are citizens of Home," Mackay reminded him, "we can carry anything we please openly crossing USNA territory. I find that many people are less prone to test you, if they can see they are dealing with a serious force right up front. But if you like, we'll change after delivering you to your hotel and affect a less militaristic appearance."
"No, no, I think I might get used to it," Buscemi allowed. "It's a culture shock though, let me tell you."
"You should visit Home some time," Mackay suggested. "About half the population goes visibly armed in public spaces. Plus whatever fraction feels better to carry concealed."
"I've seen pictures online from European sites. I didn't know whether to believe it, or if it was some weird government propaganda designed to make you guys look like nut cases." He shrugged. "You don't know what the hell to believe anymore. Ya know?"
"If you would follow the line," Mackay nodded at the short queue of other passengers, "we have a couple associates securing the area outside the zero G zone. The bearing there is a natural choke point of which we are more concerned than any other area in spin."
"I wondered where the other two were."
"Just to clarify a point," Mackay inquired, "do you wish us to extend our net of protection over your associates also?" he asked, with a nod at the four thugs.
April 4: A Different Perspective Page 17
