April 4: A Different Perspective

by Mackey Chandler

  "Nobody needs to tell me to put it on. Something is wrong for there to be some kind of an explosion, like that noise just now and I'm not taking any chances."

  "You heard how much it costs to fix one of those suits back up. We can't afford that, you need to put it back in the closet."

  "No," Eric said, not arguing, just a flat refusal.

  "What did you say young man?"

  "I said no and if you try to take it away from me I'll fight you," he made clear. His sister was shocked speechless, mouth hanging open.

  "If you don't want to put one on that's fine. I'll put on your headstone – 'She saved eight-hundred dollars.' See if I won't, but I won't die, gasping in vacuum, so you can be cheap. I have eight- hundred of my own money, if it comes to that. You don't know any better about living up here than Lindsy or I do and I say there's some kind of danger right now. I'm not going to seal up and start using suit air, but I'm going to have it on and adjusted, just in case," he told them. In fact it was unrolled and he was slipping his legs into the suit even as he spoke to them.

  "You better believe I'm going to have some words with your father when he comes home," Linda threatened him.

  "Go ahead," Eric said adjusting his sleeves. "I'm not a little kid anymore. I won't do something I know is stupid, just because you tell me to. I wouldn't do something stupid because dad tells me either, but I don't expect him to tell me something this idiotic."

  The com screen lit up without anyone going near it and an unfamiliar face was displayed.

  "There is a pressure emergency at several places in the rings. If you find your corridor door sealed be aware there may not be pressure outside your cubic. If you find that is the case please call the com code shown on the screen and inform maintenance. I suggest you keep your emergency pressure suit close to hand and take it with you if you move about Home. It appears from the multiple locations damaged, this was some sort of attack. We have no information yet if it is over, or ongoing. Your pardon for pushing this emergency message past your filters, but it seemed vital. This is M3 com, end message," he said, awkwardly. It was obviously unscripted. He spoke into the camera and his eyes didn't track like he was reading.

  Eric had everything adjusted and the front seal pulled up all the way just a few centimeters short of closing and activating the air and the helmet faceplate open. That was good you could do that, because the helmet wasn't easily removable.

  "Is our outside door locked?" his mom asked.

  "I don't have any idea," he replied. "I'll go back and check it now. If it's open I'll check as far as the elevators to make sure we can get to them and be right back."

  Linda visibly forced herself not to say something, probably ordering Eric not to go out in the corridor, but swallowed it, knowing he might refuse again. Lindsy looked scared. They both stood there in their night clothes, not saying anything to each other until he came back.

  "There is light and air in the corridor and nothing between here and the elevators, but beyond the elevators there is some kind of a wall sealing off the whole corridor. It has bright yellow stripes on it and no smaller door in it. But there's a small view port and the corridor beyond the wall looks normal, but nobody walking around. Of course I can't see if there is air."

  "Maybe we can get some news on the com," Lindsy suggested.

  "Go ahead," Eric invited her, "it's the middle of the night. I'm going to sleep some more. You won't bother me." They watched unbelieving as he laid back down on the sofa bed, still in the pressure suit and turned his back to the room.

  * * *

  "Where are you eventually going to stop?" Wiggen asked. They had gone west on surface streets and country lanes, until late in the day they came to the start of a suburban area. When they came to a fenced in self-storage facility, the office had a sign in the window that it was closed for the day. Mel produced a card and inserted it in the gate reader to gain admittance.

  He had to get out to unlock the overhead door on a unit and lift it manually. The produce truck was backed into the unit and parked. His long weapon was broken down and put in a short bag that didn't betray it's nature and they locked up and went to the smaller unit next door. The door rose to reveal a plain vanilla sedan. There were cabinets in the back and Mel opened the trunk and tossed various bags and bundles in. He surprised her by leaving the long gun in one of the cabinets. Just when she thought he wasn't going to answer her question, he did.

  "I want to go into West Virginia. I have some com gear stowed in a cache there, with which we can call Home. Before you ask again, I don't have any connection to Home, but I don't have any base or facility on the continent I'm sure hasn't been infiltrated by the Patriot Party. I have no way to remove you to Europe or South America. I didn't have the means, or foresight, to stash away a boat or aircraft capable of reaching either. If I stole one I'd still need a pilot, because those aren't among my skills. I didn't fund these vehicles and equipment out of my own pocket. They were paid for by what little petty cash I was able to divert from your protective detail. It wasn't that vast a sum."

  "Well, they made a big thing about freedom to travel to Home. We'll see how committed they are to that," Wiggen said. "Miss Lewis has asked favors of me. Time to call in a favor of my own and see if she knows how to play that game."

  "If she refuses, I suggest you cut her off from any more favors." Mel advised, smiling at the irony of it.

  "As charitable and forgiving as you know me to be, I just might have to, Mel."

  * * *

  The M3 information site showed two damaged sections, right next to each other. Then a warehouse facility unhit and another damaged section, the one with an air plant. The two clustered together were separated from Jeff's by one compartment. That meant there were two emergency pressure curtains cutting off adjacent sections of the rings. He was just outside the curtain, since he walked over the black stripe of it circling the corridor, every time he approached his office.

  He got the blinking orange light of a high priority message and minimized the M3 map. It was Jon from security and he was in a plain t-shirt. Jeff had never seen him like that.

  "Jeff we need you to activate your plan to attach ships to the south dockage and push the hab out of our current orbit. We are slowing the spin back down already to facilitate that."

  "Do you have an OK from Mitsubishi? and where do you want to move it? The plan had three alternatives."

  "Lewis gave me orders to move it, not a request, on his own authority as resident manager. He said it is well within his authority to do anything to safeguard M3's physical integrity in an emergency. He says it is simply too dangerous to remain here. I didn't argue with him," Jon added. "As to where, he says L2."

  "I'll start making calls right now," Jeff promised. "I'm calling the construction gang and telling them to secure all their scooters and loose materials as a balanced load, within the hour. The radio shack will be grappled on the north hub and anything left behind will have to be towed or ferried to our new location. We should have two ships attached and start initial thrust between an hour and two hours. We'll have the other two ships on by three hours."

  "You don't have to worry about the radio shack. There isn't enough of it left to be worth attaching, unless you need the scrap metal," Jon said with a fierce face.

  "Anyone hurt?"

  "Sally and somebody in a suit we haven't ID'd, are dead. Graham Norris was sealed up in a hard suit and it knocked him senseless. He's in the infirmary with a concussion and doesn't remember it. The Doc is looking him over for other problems."

  "Bring it anyway," Jeff instructed. "Even if you have to tie it down under a net."

  "Whatever for?"

  "It's a crime scene. We want it for evidence. This was an attack, not a meteor." Jeff pointed out the obvious.

  "You are doing my job for me," Jon declared distressed. "Be right back, I have to tell rescue and repair that the ring sites are crime scenes too and photograph and take samples accordingly." His
window dropped into a thumbnail in the corner and the audio cut off.

  Jeff was getting a stiff neck tilting his head unconsciously to look at the canted screen. He thought about taking it down, but decided best leave it alone if it was working and worked his neck, getting a satisfying crunch.

  Jon came back to Jeff frowning, "Thanks, I don't know why I was treating it like an accident. Just couldn't get my head wrapped around something so different, I guess."

  "Do you know who did this?" Jeff asked, face a mask.

  "I'd be scared to tell you if I knew. When you get that dead poker face and icy voice I knew the question even before you got it all out. I had to clamp down to keep from pissing myself, picturing a couple billion megatons, hammering some country to the world's biggest parking lot."

  "So you don't know yet?" Jeff asked again, ignoring all the commentary.

  "Targeting radar on the Rock gave us exact trajectories before it was destroyed. We compared that with the traffic catalog of known objects and have a match. The militia has already launched two volunteer ships to intercept. They will arrest anyone aboard if possible, do a search and document the equipment, then destroy the object before they return. They are already under way and no, before you ask, I made sure neither was one of the ships you needed to move us."

  "Thank you."

  "Promise me you'll talk it over with a few people, before you kill a couple hundred million clueless Earthies and make us an even bigger stink to them," Jon begged.

  "Easily, I am not eager to do so and I will consult you if it comes to that," Jeff promised.

  "Thanks, gotta go and direct things. Call me if you need to," Jon offered and disconnected.

  * * *

  "We have a really irritating problem," Colonel Allister owned.

  "Indeed?" The General said, adding a questioning tone to the single word.

  "I told my boys to go ahead and wear their Patriot pins when they asked permission. I figured it would build morale and start the public getting acclimated to the new way of things. But it has spread online and by word of mouth, that if you are with the old regime, to wear a white brassard. Two of our agents with DHS here in the city were killed leaving lunch at a restaurant. They had on pins and no brassard."

  "Did you capture the assassins?"

  "No, they were killed about 12:30 and laid on the pavement until a local cop patrol saw them about 1500. Nobody going to their cars, or coming and going from the restaurant called it in."

  "DC is different, The General asserted quickly, "Too many people owe their livelihood to the current administration and fear they will be cast loose, or even punished by the new. I wouldn't take this for the mood of the nation," he scoffed. But inside he was chilled. He frowned with thought. "How is it we didn't get a report and location off the gunshot monitoring system? It's supposed to locate any discharge within ten meters."

  "We obtained video from a dry cleaner. The agents were about halfway to their car when six men in masks stepped from behind vehicles with compound bows. They shot from ten to eighteen meter range and one agent managed to draw before going down, but didn't fire. They took their weapons and IDs and disappeared in different directions. Except for a few shafts that went straight through, they were pretty much pin cushions," Col. Allister said, visibly squeamish. "I had no idea body armor was so ineffective against arrows."

  "Yes, or swords, or blunt trauma from a club," The General agreed. "I doubt you'll run into such innovation on a wide scale though."

  "We have had one more incident I'd term 'innovative. A foursome of Department of Agriculture agents went in a lunch place in Austin, wearing their pins. They made it back to the office before they displayed some respiratory distress. One managed to tell EMS where they had eaten, but the two in that ambulance were dead by the time they reached the hospital, poisoned," he declared. "The ambulance with the other two never showed up at a hospital. The city fire department said it wasn't manned by a crew on call and had been stolen. When a team went out to the restaurant it was empty and had been burned out before the crew running it dispersed."

  "Perhaps," The General said, reluctantly, it would be better to rescind displaying the pins for now."

  "I already did," Col. Allister admitted. "Sorry if I ran ahead of you. But what do we do about the brassards? If we wear false colors we risk friendly fire."

  The general had no answer to that.

  Chapter 35

  "It's warm," John Love told his Commander, calling from the militia ship Begger's Ride.

  "People or machinery?" Lu Lanakila asked from the command vessel Silly Willy standing off at a safer distance and relaying pix and data to Home.

  "Could be either, not too hot for people," he added. "Look at that snout on the thing," John said as they glided in from the rear quarter.

  "Hail them again," Lu instructed. "Ship and suit frequencies and a few others just to be sure they know we are talking. They had radar up before, so they know we are here."

  "Nothing - arrogant bastards."

  "That framework is a rail gun," Lu told him. "That what they look like on a Navy ship, when you strip the weather cover off. But that looks to be about three times as long as a ship's. Don't get on the business end of that. In fact, burn it off with laser fire, when you get a view closer to the point it emerges."

  John squeezed the controls gently, killing a little velocity toward the satellite, letting his angle of drift shift more forward. When he could almost see the base of the open lattice work projection from the front of the satellite, he had his gunner severe it. The man had to walk the beam across it three times before it parted. It was sturdier than it looked.

  The cylindrical shape rotated slowly and with a steady motion that spoke of gyros rather than jets. There were no visible puffs of thrusters either. When it had rotated perhaps a third of a turn on its long axis it stopped.

  "A USNA emblem came into sight from the other side when they rolled," John sent. They could see it themselves from the feed, but nobody complained about his commentary.

  "He's doing a flip now. It moves slower on the long axis. That will bring the stub of the weapon to bear in maybe two minutes. Is it a danger with the extension cut off?"

  "Yeah, it has an injection mechanism that starts the shot before it hits the charged rails. Pour laser fire in the opening and don't let him line up on you. It can still toss a projectile out at about seven hundred meters a second, if it's similar to a Naval unit."

  John hit the thrusters for side movement, taking him out of the plane the stub was rotating in. It stopped and rotated briefly on the long axis. It obviously couldn't do both at once. His fire was melting metal around the weapon base, yellow hot globs floating off various directions. Suddenly there was a eruption of hot gas and debris from within.

  "I think you probably heated up his projectile until the charge that opens the canister and spreads the shot ignited," Lu theorized. The satellite stopped turning, so something significant had happened.

  "What do you want us to do?" John asked. "Go over and cut our way in?"

  "No, no, no. If they are idiots or fanatics, they may have small arms and resist. See the radiator fins on the back? Just set your laser on a wide beam and pour low power into the cooling system. Not enough to breach it, just to overload the system. When it gets to be a sauna inside, they can come out or cook. Up to them and they have plenty of time to decide. If they come out armed, use the laser on them. We have enough martyrs for my taste. I don't want to lose anybody else. I read you fifteen hundred meters from them. Ease back a little as you paint them. If they self destruct I don't want them to take you out too.

  "I really, really thought it would be Chinese," John said. "I guess we can't blame this one on Singh. How far back do you think is safe for a small nuke?

  "Better make it five kilometers. A nuke wouldn't bust you right now, but why absorb any more radiation than you need to? Something big is happening in North America," Lu told him. "Didn't you see the news
before we came out here?"

  "No, they roused me in the middle of my night and I staggered to the ship without looking at anything I didn't have to. I let my second have the comm and slept a little more on the way out," he revealed. "Anybody wakes me up early, like these guys did, I'd just as soon put a missile up their butt and go home, begging your pardon if that doesn't meet doctrine."

  "Take a look at the news feed. I don't think anything is going to happen for a few minutes."

  "Oh crap!" John said out loud, when he found the picture of the White House on fire. "That's going to piss off a lot of the peasants."

  "Really?" Lu asked. "I didn't think the general population was that fond of the current administration."

  "They're not, but there's something about human nature. We pick sides. Even if both sides are great flaming jackasses, people still tend to pick one over the other, like it matters. Wiggen hasn't made them love her, but she hasn't desecrated national treasures either. Burning the White House is like dynamiting Mount Rushmore or melting down the Liberty Bell. People don't like you messing with their childhood symbols."

  "Interesting, You might be right. Can you give me a temperature reading off the hull?"

  "Just a hair over thirty-five degrees by the infrared emission," John told him.

  "Excellent," Lu told them, "that's past a pleasant day on the beach."

  It was another fifteen minutes before a suited figure came out the lock and held both empty hands up in front of him. The hull read forty-six degrees by then. "I give up," he said over suit radio.

  "Send your best zero G man over and shut off his valves and throw his air bottle back in the airlock. It's too easy to put a bomb in one. If you want to take a bottle over to him it probably fits. He might feel safer to surrender. I wish we'd thought to make up a couple bottles with a sleepy mix. Make a note of that for next time. Put him in your freight module with the a second man and pressurize. Then peel him out of that suit and inspect it for suicide bombs, before you let him in your flight cabin."