April 2: Down to Earth

by Mackey Chandler

  "Gentleman, your weapons," Gial demanded, with a double snap of his fingers to hurry them up. They produced two pistols very slowly, eyeballing the machine gun and offered them reluctantly by finger and thumb, across the threshold. He accepted them and reached across and relieved the bent over agent of his also. "My, you fellows must buy these by huge lots, the way you run through them, remembering how April and Don had taken the man's weapons just hours ago. Msr. Burnet," he addressed Émile formally, "I don't wish to take your prisoner aboard. Would you remove him from our space and we'll let his invasion go in this instance."

  "Let go la valise and back off, bite," Émile instructed through bared teeth, mixing languages in his anger, barely controlling himself. He was visibly on the edge, breathing harshly and face red.

  The agent uncurled his fingers from the bag handles and eased upright and out of their vessel's interior space slowly. The pistol stayed pressed between his eyes, helping push him all the way back, until Émile's arm was extended straight. Then he eased it back, but didn't lower it. Gial didn't blame the Earthie's caution. Émile had so much pressure on the trigger he was still scared he might shoot him accidentally.

  "Msr. Beckett," he addressed Anton, "please precede me to the bridge and sound Duty Stations – Battle and prepare to undock. As soon as we seal up here, I'd like you to inform local control we are undocking and I'll join you up there by the time you take us on thrusters beyond the local control limit."

  He nodded to the station police. "If you two would be pleased to come aboard, you have my leave. You'll have to show me what's in your baggage, for the safety of my vessel and I can't guarantee where I can take you, but I won't hand you over to these swine."

  "Thank you," Christian said, pushed off carefully through the edge of the lock to avoiding interfering with both crewman and rolled over to land on the far bulkhead. He took hold facing back to them. The younger man shoved off with a panicked leap and piled into the locker doors opposite in a heap, so that his friend had to snag him and his bag, that were drifting away. He lost control completely, covering his face with both hands, sobbing softly, ashamed and trying to hide and stifle it.

  "We're undocking very quickly," Gial informed the three still outside his lock. "I suggest you dog this hatch yourselves, if you don't want the section blown to vacuum. Not that I care for you personally." Anton took that as a signal to slap the door closure, without direct order and two curved sections slid quickly shut from top and bottom, of the opening, then pivoted outward as they almost touched, sealing with a solid thud. Anton returned the gun to its rack and drew a couple restraining bands across it, leaving quickly to carry out his maneuvering orders.

  "Émile, take this man to my cabin and secure him for boost and have the medical officer administer a sedative, if he concurs it is needed. Then assume your duty station."

  "You're safe now," he assured the young man touching his shoulder. He nodded his understanding, but still couldn't regain his composure. "Just stay in my bunk while we maneuver and we'll be along to help you soon. Use the head if you have need first." Émile helped him away, guiding him.

  "Are they that terrible? He asked Christian, unbelieving despite the evidence of his eyes, "or is he overreacting?"

  "Dan isn't a coward," Chris assured him. "We have to work with them, we get to know them much better than the public. Too many of them are sadists," he said simply.

  "I don't mean to seem the ungracious host, but I want to see your bags quickly and then if you'll join me on the flight deck, there's an extra pull out seat, where you can ride as well as anywhere and see a great deal more. He opened a bin and pulled out a heavy plastic sack to transfer things.

  Anton had reached the bridge and sounded a nerve grating buzzer, to call the crew to duty stations. They were fortunate they were on long count to depart anyway and nobody was off ship.

  Gial went right into the younger man's bag transferring items to his plastic bag. There were a few items of clothing and some sports shoes. A folder of printed pictures, of a normal unremarkable family, with him in a few shots. There were surprisingly, a couple old books printed on paper and a rather nice camera. He just stuffed the whole bag back into the luggage rather than do it item by item.

  "Well, no bombs or national treasures," he quipped, feeling like a voyeur, prying.

  There was a long drag to one side, that told them they had left the dock, then they swayed back the other way, as Anton headed for the edge of the station's controlled volume.

  The older man's bag was almost emptied by the first item out - an expensive custom p-suit, folded and secured with elastic bands. There were a couple packs of footies and gloves, then a bunch of disks - music and data probably. A small case when opened was a mix of casino chips from various houses. Gial was surprised to see they were 10K dollar and 10K EM denomination gaming chips. Lots of them.

  "I've known for awhile I might be leaving, Chris explained, "and these are one of the few things as good as cash, you can use to draw your accounts down without raising suspicions. They mass less than precious metals too. The snoops probably just think I have a gambling problem."

  A small portfolio had legal papers and photos. Then on the bottom there was a hard case, well worn and heavy. It opened without a lock and there was a military model pistol. A 14mm recoilless, with the bulky cone of a brake on the muzzle. Also a cleaning kit and thirty rounds of the big shells in mixed loads, some soft, some armor piercing, in a plastic case. It was really well worn, the finish rubbed through from holster wear in places.

  Gial returned it to the bag and asked Chris. "Would you put your Taser in here for now, please? We don't have the quaint custom of changing commanders under way, like the Chinese, so you shouldn't need it before the next port. I'll put these in a cubic meter bin," he announced as he did it, stuffing everything back in the bag. He considered thoughtfully and added the gun he'd lifted from the bandaged agent. "You deserve that from him for the assault and I don't need more that a matched brace of these things. It's the custom to go armed now on Home, if we can get you there, so you might like having it. Even they would regard that recoilless as excessive in pressure." He slammed the door. "You can palm the lock and we'll go see where we're off to. I have to call in and tell my people I have a tiger by the tail." He looked at Christian with a grimace. "I'll have the medical officer bring you a cold pack also. Your face is already swelling where he slapped you."

  "Yeah he got me pretty solid," Chris allowed, touching by his ear gingerly. "You're giving me access to the locker under way?" he asked surprised, palming the lock.

  "I don't see anything that's a hazard to my vessel," he assured him. "You're not such a fool as to shoot the big gun in a ship you're riding. The over pressure alone on that monster would probably burst a compartment and I hate to think what it would sound like. Besides, you could have strapped it on instead of the Taser, to help you get here and didn't. So you have some idea where it is appropriate. Come, follow me to the flight deck."

  Chapter 12

  Having breakfast with friends was one of the things April enjoyed most. In fact, if she had an appointment for each morning in the week, she was happy every day in anticipation. Heather had listened to the story of her adventure on New Las Vegas and was pitching an idea to her when she stopped. "You got mail didn't you?" she said, in an accusing tone.

  "Yeah, I'm sorry," April admitted. "How did you know?"

  "Well, I can't see your eyes scan inside those spex, but you were attacking breakfast like a starving animal and then all of a sudden you stopped shoveling it in and kept chewing the same bite thoughtfully for a long time. That's pretty obvious."

  "I really do apologize. I was still listening and I am interested. Let me tell you what I got and you'll understand a little why it distracted me. My grandpa got a FedEx shipment of electronics this morning and inside was a plain envelope. It had written on it ‘April Lewis - private and personal.' Someone went to a lot of trouble to get that in there.
It's clean too. No prints, no organic traces and no biohazards."

  "Probably some young guy that saw you on a web cast, who couldn't accept his love was unrequited when you ignored his attempts to contact you."

  April had been happy a few times, that she was well separated from the sort of people who stalked public figures. Since she'd been on the news last year she'd received much more unsolicited attention than she wanted. The cost of an orbital ride kept the nut cases far away, but she had received some strange mail. "It doesn’t feel like that sort of thing, but anyway I'll find out later what it's about. You do have my undivided attention again. I promise."

  "As I was saying, now is the time to grab a hunk of land on the Moon. The Americans, Chinese, Japanese and Russians all have very moderate claims and they are all so far apart we can pick an open area and not pose a threat to any of them. But they keep sending study parties out and once a rover has been through an area and they have spent time and money surveying and testing, they consider it part of their sphere of influence, even if they don't leave a moon hut or survey markers behind."

  "The Israelis and the Australians are talking about setting up independent bases and if they can there will be other smaller countries rush in too. Everybody is anticipating the cost of maintaining bases will drop, with material from the rock and possible a snowball, so now is a window of opportunity. Nobody is feeling crowded yet but they will. So we have a limited window before it's all claimed."

  "So what do you want me to do? Buy some lots?" April asked.

  "Much more than that, I want you to be in from the ground floor and help me structure it correctly and offer advice. I want you to pay for your land with service. We'll need to drop a modified rover on our site and some sort of decent sized moon huts and vehicle shelter arches, that can be plowed over for the rovers. We'll need a com link up and a continuing human presence, to appear legitimate to people. And I'd like to try to keep political ties to Home, if people here will allow that. I want to drop all the important stuff in a short period of time, so it's presented as an accomplished feat and there can't be any debate about whether to allow it to proceed."

  "So you want Lewis Couriers to add a regular Moon run?"

  "It doesn't have to be a regular weekly or anything. Just so you can drop supplies as needed and list it as a regular destination for someone to buy a ticket. You may have to take a loss on an occasional flight, but we'd try to have standby freight, that could be sent with an unexpected passenger."

  "Remember how they tried to steal the Rock?" April reminded her. "If you want to hold a land area, the only way you'll succeed, is if you make clear to the politicians you can hold the area, by force of arms. That's the only thing they respect. What are you going to put there to defend your base and territory?"

  "Our huts will have a laser system and a small mobile rack of missiles like Dave puts on your ships and the rover will have missiles too. Once we get a little cash flowing in, I want to bury one moon hut deep enough it will be basically a bunker. And then when, we have a freight rover free I have something I bought I want to bring up from Tonga," she said, with a suddenly coy grin.

  "Dear me, I worry when you smile like that. What did you buy, a surplus sixteen inch battleship canon?"

  Heathers smile turned to dismay. "Well not that big. But, yeah, I bought a canon off a ship, but just a frigate. I never would have thought you'd guess that, in a million years," she admitted, disappointed it wasn't a surprise.

  "It was a joke. I mean, I thought it was a joke. What the heck kinda canon could you afford, or even lift to orbit? The kind I was talking about, I don't think anybody even has a lifter that could get the barrel to orbit."

  "How many millimeters is sixteen inches? I must be figuring wrong."

  April thought a second. "A bit over four hundred millimeters," she estimated.

  It was Heather's turn to be stunned. "That's the bore?" She wanted to make sure.

  "Yup, it tossed out projectiles that weighed over a thousand kilograms, heavy as a ground car and accurate out to something over forty kilometers too. Sucker would leave craters, looked like they belonged on Luna."

  "That's amazing. I never knew they built them that big. I found a fellow on Tonga that could get me a Bofors Mark IV 57mm. It was scrapped off a Malaysian boat they took out of service. It’s a real nice little gun, that can engage surface or air targets. I was actually looking for a cheaper 40mm, but this is nicer even if it's a little heavier. We can't afford to lift the armored deck turret it was housed in, but if we cut everything off, we can break it into four bundles, I can get it shipped up cheaper than you'd think. The tube is the biggest thing. Some of the frame we'll duplicate in aluminum or titanium locally, rather than lift them. The shop down there has already stripped all the normal lubricants off and when it comes up it will be all surface treated and vacuum lubed. I already have the ballistic computer and am converting it to lunar specs."

  "How far will it reach?" April wondered.

  "With full propellant charges, muzzle velocity will exceed escape velocity on the moon, so it can really reach any target we can see, or paint with radar and indirect fire to any surface point on the Moon itself. In theory it could even engage earth orbit targets from the Moon, but not very accurately. They had shells for sale that steer themselves with little winglets, in the air, so with a little modification they can use pressurized gas thrusters to do the same in vacuum. They seemed to have a lot of drawings and ideas all made up already."

  That sounded suspiciously like all the specs and systems Dave's shop already had right to hand, when they militarized the Happy Lewis. April explained to Heather how they suspected quite a few other ships had received hidden missile and laser systems, before the Lewis. Perhaps it was the same with the canon and they were not at all first.

  "Well, the fellow from Bofors was very helpful. He had a chip available that could receive laser targeting control in the back of the shell and actuate the thrusters way back from the target. He pointed out if you used too much volume for thruster gas, you reduced the size of the explosive charge, until you reached a trade off, unless you could actually directly impact a target. So you need to correct as far back as possible."

  "I told him we'd only need about 50cc for the explosive and he was real happy with the volume that would leave for gas, but he wondered if that would be enough charge to delaminate the shell body. He asked me how many gram-equivalents to PBX it would be, since that is how most vacuum rated munition was charged. I told him I didn't know, but I could express it in TNT equivalence, which seemed to amuse him." But he said, "OK give me that spec."

  "Well, when I told him we figured on loading two and four kilo-ton equivalent charges, I thought he was going to have puppies. He didn't say anything for a long time. Then he kind of freaked out, with a big burst of Swedish I didn't understand. After he calmed down, he very sternly recommended we fail fuse them, so we didn't have any looping around the Earth-Moon system, waiting to bump into something. Which sounded like a good idea. I don't know if it was a coincidence, but Sweden finally ratified the EU bill to recognize us the very next day, after dragging their heels for nearly a year. What do you think?"

  "I think they are happy to be friendly with any lady, who has her own atomic canon. They'd have probably diplomatically recognized you all by your lonesome, without Home," she said laughing. "How many rounds does this puppy pump out a minute?"

  "Two hundred twenty a minute, but a magazine only holds a hundred twenty. We planned to put the two kilo-ton unguided shells in one magazine for ground targets and the four kilo-ton guided shells in the other for space targets. They both mount up and switch off during fire. That's as much money as we want to spend at first on ammo and as many accumulator cells as we want to have to make. It takes a couple minutes to replace the empty magazines and you know how space battles go. Three minutes into it, if anyone won they're going home, not reloading."

  "Let's see, 240 times 3kiloton average. That'
s 720 kiloton you can pump out in a little over a minute spread out real efficiently. That should be pretty formidable on top of your other systems. Sounds to me like you can hold against quite a force. So if I drop you with your equipment, how do you mark off your boundaries and make your claim?"

  "That's what the rover is for. With a plow on the front it can plow up a berm and stick a metal rod in it every hundred meters or two, with an optical and radar reflector on the end. You couldn't wander across the edge by accident and not see it was a man made border and with the reflectors it will be obvious on radar to a ship setting down also."

  "So is that the lot size? A hundred meters or two square?" April was picturing her families cubic that was the basic source of their wealth. All of their apartment and the non-rotating cubic at the hub both would all sit in a hundred meter square easily.

  "Oh no April. We want to advertise these as ranches. I just want to be able to see one marker from another along an edge. I was thinking twenty-five kilometers square."

  April tried to visualize a flat surface that big. It was breath taking. Then it hit her. "What about the Moon itself. Do you own the rocks and dirt where your land is?" she expressed as well as she could.

  "With real estate, you own the mineral rights, in a wedge all the way to the center of the planet. In reality you run out of technologies to dig, long before the sides angle in. They can only dig a few kilometers on Earth and drill a bit deeper. Luna is cooler and less gravity so I imagine you can go deeper, but I don't know how far."

  April tried to imagine owning that much stuff. More material than Home was made of. A lot of it would be junk but it was still mass. And there would be a considerable amount of aluminum and titanium, a bit of silicon and iron, even a bit of calcium and potassium, oxygen too although it would be bound tightly. That's OK, power is cheap. She had to look at the studies of regolith composition again.

  "I need your help, so what I'm offering is this: Tell me how big a hunk you want and I'll plow off your boundaries and mark them. I'll do the same for myself and any other partners, but we have to be reasonable. We can't spend weeks marking off big lots and run up expenses, before we mark some out for sale. Later when we have some sales, we can mark some more out for ourselves. It might be good to have holdings spread around anyway. You never know how things will develop and which land will end up more valuable years from now. The rover should be able to average about twenty kilometers an hour, the guys who have driven one tell me. So it could plow off the outside of four lots bundled in a shift. That would be a square fifty kilometers on a side. Would that be enough to satisfy you for a start?"