April 8: It's Always Something

by Mackey Chandler

  The other very amusing thing was that April had seen lots people with and without Life Extension Therapy, and witnessed them making the transition. She could tell from a quick look at someone's face if they'd had the full range of genetic modifications done past their twenties. The wrinkles and sags of middle age might be moderated, and somebody in their sixties might look like a healthy forty at best, but they never looked like a kid again. The newsman John was heavily gene mod at a glance, and a flaming hypocrite.

  * * *

  As soon as Kurt unbelted and stepped down from the open hopper, Monsieur Poincaré was waiting for him, said, "No need to go in and unsuit first. The site to show you is very close and then you won't have to put your suit on again until you go home tomorrow. I'll drop Miss Wrigley at the lock and she'll be assigned quarters next to yours and join you for breakfast."

  They hadn't actually discussed this. In fact they hadn't spoken much at all on the flight. But Kurt was uncomfortable letting them be separated. He had noticed Deloris was armed, with a large holster on the outside of her suit, something he hadn't seen as often on the moon as on Home. That gave him an idea to raise an objection. He spoke up and hoped she wouldn't contradict him.

  "Deloris is my pilot and security. She'd be remiss to leave me unescorted," Kurt insisted.

  Poincaré nodded, but hesitated to speak. Likely it took him a second to adjust to the idea before he trusted himself to reply. "Ah, very well then, I'll call and dismiss her escort waiting at the lock. Fortunately we have extra seating in the jitney," he said, and invited them to the vehicle on which he'd arrived. It looked like a stretch golf cart with fat tires and an extra large sun shade.

  Poincaré had a driver who remained seated and didn't speak with him. If he called he did so privately and on a different channel than he shared with them. The jitney, as he styled it, had six seats, all sized and comfortable for vacuum suits and room for luggage and gear.

  In the shade Kurt cleared his faceplate to transparency and looked away from Poincaré toward Deloris. She too had her faceplate set clear. Kurt assumed she would know helmet talk and with a quick series of twitches and winks said: Thanks for going along with that.

  Her face was turned to Poincaré and she couldn't reply in kind. Kurt had no idea if the French had the same sort of facial sign language, but even if they didn't or it was quite different she didn't want to be seen communicating around their host. She had a perfect poker face, not even tracking his facial movements with her eyes. Kurt was impressed with her control.

  "Would you turn your suit radios down to minimum power please?" Poincaré requested. "The com sats can pick them up easily otherwise and I'd like to be able to speak freely."

  "Sure, mine goes down to a tenth watt," Kurt volunteered. "Does that look good now?" he asked, inviting the man to check his field strength.

  "Yes, Poincaré agreed, and when Deloris said, "Radio check, radio check," he nodded again. "The satellite com network was originally put up by the North Americans, so it was a reasonable concern. They might be able to eavesdrop on the common suit frequencies."

  The jitney turned away from the buildings and crossed a surprisingly large landing field with several small craft and a full sized shuttle parked well away from each other. The sun was near straight overhead and Kurt wasn't sure of his directions anymore. They came to the edge of the paved field with only the barren moonscape between them and the near horizon. There was a small pad designated for ground vehicles to one side at the end of the marked lane they had been following, but they ran off the end onto the regolith. It was obvious from the tracks fanning out from the road end that others had been this way regularly.

  They hadn't gone far before a bump in the distance resolved itself as something other than a large rock. There was a dark band to be seen all around the bottom, which revealed itself as the shaded area under a canopy. The one side had the cover brought down to the regolith at a gradual angle to it wouldn't cast a shadow for satellite cameras. It was slightly past full lunar so things clicked in Kurt's head and he was oriented again. The direction they were facing was roughly towards Armstrong and Central was off beyond and a bit to his right. The jitney pulled in under the canopy high end with plenty of clearance.

  The canopy was large, perhaps three times as long as the wreck it covered, but they needed room to park the jitney hidden under it, and there was a big streak of melted regolith behind the wreck that would stand out like a sore thumb from above. Poincaré kept quiet and let them look at the wreck a bit.

  "I see a drive wheel at the back and tracks in the regolith behind it in the blast shadow. I assume the raised lumps along each side are the big drive train components that didn't melt easily. The two bigger lumps must be the electric drive motors for each track." The middle was mostly gone. That wasn't surprising. If it was a North American rover, as he suspected, they had an aluminum body which Central people referred to derisively as 'beer cans'. Kurt could see now that the smear behind the vehicle wasn't just fused regolith, it was also mixed with the melted remains of the rover.

  "Are you showing us this as a warning that you have a new weapons system?" Kurt asked. "I know My L...I know that Sovereign Anderson has indirect fire weapons and missiles, but to my knowledge she doesn't have the kind of heavy beam weapon that could do this sort of damage."

  Kurt didn't expect him to laugh, although it was a strained sort of uncomfortable laugh.

  "You sold us this weapon," Poincaré insisted. "The rover here showed up from Armstrong the day after we brought the tunnel boring machine back from central. It was in two sections and we placed it on the field with the ship crane and joined it up. Not too difficult an operation since it was designed to be split like that, with joints and connectors near the middle from the start."

  Kurt nodded, because he'd worked with the machines.

  "The field controllers saw the rover approaching and demanded it stop a couple kilometers short and allow an inspection. We'd heard there was chaos at Armstrong and worried the trouble was coming here. Worried it was armed people or even that it might be a bomb. They ignored us, didn't respond to the radio at all. The tunnel machine was assembled and ready to crawl over and go down the elevator. When the operator heard the controllers trying to stop the rover, and getting panicky about it, he took the machine over to the edge of the pavement instead and looked for it.

  "When the rover was about a kilometer out he painted it with the alignment laser and jockeyed the machine around on the tracks to get it pointed right. The rover was coming almost straight at him so that wasn't such a difficult thing. You can adjust the outer ring of rock crackers, the big lasers, in or out a couple degrees to make the cut tight or loose. He turned them all the way in to focus it as much as possible and turned it on full power for about thirty seconds." Poincaré sighed. "Three or four seconds would have been entirely sufficient for a thin hulled aluminum rover."

  "If he'd been shooting at him driving past at an angle he might have missed," Kurt guessed. "He'd have to lead him and get everything lined up without any significant elevation or depression and let him drive into his aim point. I've seen those machines moving and they only go at a slow walk. They don't turn easily or smoothly sitting in one place."

  "Yes, well a lot of us are conflicted whether the operator is a mad man or a hero," Poincaré admitted. " We don't need this complication right when we are finessing a peaceful withdrawal from being dominated by France. It's always something. We neither want to be seen as doing something war-like immediately upon being granted our independence, not do we wish to involve Central as a supplier. You know how Earth propaganda works. The USNA news machine will read our statement that it was a tunnel boring machine with a droll look and a wink at best. If they see conflict to their advantage they'll be screaming all sorts of nonsense that it's a mysterious lunar death ray."

  "I'll relay this to Sovereign Anderson," Kurt promised, "with pix to show what happened. The idiot might not have known how to us
e the radio properly, you know. It could have been one of the Earthies they wiped out trying to get away. If so it's amazing he made it this far without wrecking the damn thing. I got trained on rover driving recently and it's not nearly as easy as it looks. One of the favorite tricks for new rover drivers is to hang it up on a rock wedged under the undercarriage. It's hard to judge their size in lunar lighting, with the absence of the normal visual clues an Earth person expects. The more so the faster you try to go."

  "Thank you, walk around and get shots from other angles if you wish," Poincaré invited. "Do you have any suggestions how to approach the North Americans on this?"

  "I was told quite sternly I was to be an observer here," Kurt insisted, "and I have no authority to speak for Heather as a subject or peer. I'm simply a hired man who had a loose enough schedule to come collect data for them."

  Poincaré nodded acknowledgment, looking very unhappy, and biting his lip.

  "May I make an observation here entirely on my own? Just one fellow spacer to another and you can take what you want from it or simply ignore it." Kurt offered.

  Poincaré made a gesture of flipping both hands out in resignation, because you can't really shrug in a moon suit. You can, but it doesn't show well. "What can it possibly hurt? I'm short of good ideas. Everyone here seems afraid to suggest anything lest it go bad and the stink attach to them. Please, speak your mind freely."

  "I just returned from a couple months on Earth. Things in North America were...chaotic. It was a bad choice going back, bad timing at the very least. I thought I'd be of help to my family, but that didn't work out. The south, not Mexico but the old south of the USA, the rural areas particularly, have always been a bit rough and they can be as insular as any other region that has its own customs. Now they're getting a lot of people streaming in as refugees. The politicians will have a fit if you call them that, but it's the truth. Some of them have no respect for the locals. That's fine up to a point. They will call the law and the authorities will do what they can when they are able. But if they push down your fences, steal your livestock and bother your women, no southerner is going to sit on his hands waiting for the Sheriff to come tomorrow when things have gotten to that point." Kurt hesitated and looked at him for some sign he was following the narrative.

  Poincaré made a stiff little nod to go on.

  "So the good old boys, rough fellows, have a saying: "Shoot, shovel and shut up." I can't see how calling Armstrong and reporting this can bring you anything but trouble. They have enough on their plate that I doubt they are concerned with what happened to one rover fleeing their revolution. If they were at all concerned with it they'd have been in pursuit. If it were something else they'd be asking. Now, I've heard that confession is good for the soul, but I've honestly never experienced that myself. It mostly seems to attract trouble for me. With a little luck, if there's no rover sitting here with USNA marking on it, they may never ask what happened to it," Kurt suggested.

  "That does have the merit of simplicity," Poincaré agreed. "You mean it literally?"

  "Yep. Shucks...you're a third done. It's shot for damn sure. Get a back hoe or a small dozer in here and scoop a trench. It doesn't look like you could have any organic remains to worry about. Push the junk in the hole and cover it over. Pull the canopy down when the satellite coverage is thin and run a couple rovers all around here and along his old track to cover up the distinctive tread marks, and don't forget the last part, that's critical...shut up."

  "That seems pragmatic to me. I'm going to suggest that course to my peers. I won't credit you but will assume full responsibility for the operation," Poincaré said.

  "No credit needed," Kurt said, "and no blame accepted."

  "Indeed. If it goes sour my colleagues will blame me no matter the source, so no benefit to be had in giving them multiple targets. I do thank you however. I shall remember you were of help."

  "Damn right! You owe me one," Kurt agreed.

  At Poincaré quizzical look Deloris spoke up. "A colloquial expression. An eventual favor owed."

  Poincaré nodded and agreed. "Indeed, it shall be carried on my books."

  Later at dinner Kurt spoke pretty freely to Deloris, he didn't really care by that point if they had the dining room bugged. They briefly compared notes on how they arrived on the moon. She didn't get too explicit about how close she was to her two partners, but Kurt quickly decided there wasn't any spark of interest in him there. He'd finally grown up enough not to mistake common politeness for being receptive to romance.

  "I am glad you stopped them from separating us," Deloris mentioned. "If they wanted to do it now it wouldn't matter. But when we'd just arrived, and seen and spoken to nobody but Poincaré, and not seen for ourselves what the situation was in the public spaces..." she indicated where they were with an encompassing wave. "I didn't want us out of communication. Who knew if we'd need to beat a retreat to the hopper?"

  "Yes, I would have had a hard time finding you once separated. I've never been inside here to know my way around, and it's kind of strange," Kurt said. "It reminds me of ISSII where I stopped recently. They tried really hard to make it look like a street, but no street like I ever saw in Mobile, Alabama. The paving here in Marseille is even stranger than ISSII. It doesn't seem very practical to me."

  That amused Deloris. "That's supposed to be like cobblestones. It's very European. They went to a great deal of trouble to make it look like an older French town. The street lights are kind of neat too."

  "It's wasted effort for me, Kurt admitted. "I get that the lights are supposed to be artistic, but the pavement seems designed to make you think about every step, even in hard boots. It has to be really uncomfortable to walk on in soft moon boots."

  "Fortunately, Poincaré seems to have as much authority as he claimed, and we were never at risk."

  "Yes, I think it would get sorted out even if we were detained. Heather after all has a reputation. We are here on her business. But better not to let it get to that stage. I'm considering swearing to her if she'll have me," Kurt revealed. "That would be even more protection."

  "I didn't know you could ask," Deloris said.

  "One can ask anything," Kurt said, wryly. "Her assistant, Dakota, is much more than sworn, the woman is a peer, and has been from very near the start. She may veto my being a sworn subject, and I think Heather would weigh matters and see keeping her happy as more important than my utility."

  Deloris raised an eyebrow. "Would it be indelicate to wonder why?"

  "Oh...I figured everybody knew."

  "That's above my social strata," Deloris admitted, drawing a line with her hand above her eye level. "I've seen Heather a couple times in the cafeteria. It totally amazed me she went through the line and ate the same stuff as us. I'd have expected her to at least have it taken to her private quarters. I'd never presume to go up and chat with her. Besides, there is usually somebody talking to her and another hanging back waiting his turn."

  "Yeah, and if you shot both of them and gave her a few moments of peace she'd probably give you an award. Nobody wants to decide anything without her blessing," Kurt said. "I got to know her...We got to know each other, because I had to stand before her justice. You can look it up if you want. All her legal decisions are on the local net."

  "Can't you just give me the short version?" Deloris asked.

  "I was sitting eating supper and a fellow sat beside me and demanded I spy for North America. Didn't try to recruit me at all, just ordered me and threatened my sister when I refused. I killed him."

  Deloris scowled. "Is that why the elastic glove?" She hadn't wanted to ask.

  "Yeah, I totally screwed my hand up jamming a fork in him," Kurt said. "It needed surgery and it still isn't healed a hundred percent."

  "Oy...

  "Heather ruled it justified," Kurt added quickly. "Dakota never met me, though we'd seen each other, and it set her attitude toward me. I can tell she's very leery of me."

  Deloris decid
ed she shouldn't dig any deeper. At least not with Kurt himself for a source. "I hope it works out for you. Perhaps you should simply give her some time to get over it," Deloris suggested.

  "That's a possibility. I haven't discussed it with anyone else, so I'm short on advice. I won't be able to move back to Home for about a year anyhow, so I do have some time. I wish I'd just called security and turned the man in to them as an outside agent," Kurt admitted, "but I just had this visceral reaction to his threat. It's hard to explain why. He surprised me where I thought I was safe from his kind, and it was fear not anger that drove it. Being dog tired coming off work didn't help either."

  Deloris nodded. She could understand that. "One of my partners did a similar thing. We were stressed. The captain was already acting the fool. Then there was a fire aboard with alarms jolting us out of our sleep. Barak couldn't raise the bridge and he went there only to find the captain had abandoned his post to go have an illicit liaison with the XO. He came charging at him and Barak smacked him in the face with his fist. He had similar second thoughts later that he was simply standing in front of the hatch, and the man intended to thrust him aside, not attack him. But at that instant he reacted to it as an attack. It got complicated."

  "Striking the Master? Yeah, doesn't get much more complicated than that," Kurt agreed.

  "It seems like it's always something. The whole voyage got way too complicated," Deloris said, bitterly. "We launched with a crew of six and came back with three alive."

  It was Kurt's turn to look shocked. "I was told we had two fatalities during the entire construction of M3. Both during the original phase when the core was built. Even so, one of those is suspected to have been a suicide. I don't ever intend to sign up for a deep space mission now. I never had any idea they were so dangerous. And they've kept it so quiet," he marveled.