A Sudden Departure (April Book 9)
Page 16
Supposedly only emergency crew had access to his room and only if the captain or xo declared an emergency and unlocked the code from the ship's computer. He didn't believe that for a second.
Chapter 12
Aaron was almost done with his supper. Karl figured he better ask him for the favor before he stood up. Aaron wasn't big on patience to stand and listen when he was ready to march off.
"Keith Petros has a new concert recording out that everybody says is just tremendous. Do you think you could loan me two bits until payday to get it?" Karl asked.
"You're broke before payday?" Aaron asked disgusted.
"There was stuff," Karl said, and shrugged.
"And you didn't keep any back to dip into?" he asked further.
"Well yeah," Karl lied, "good thing because I needed it too."
"I won't loan it to you, but I'll pay you a bit to run an errand for me," Aaron offered.
"The download is two bits. He's got a following. The guy is worth it though," Karl said, enthused.
"Petros may be worth two bits, but the errand isn't," Aaron said. "No deal."
"I'll run your errand and owe you another," Karl offered.
"Run the errand and owe me two," Aaron demanded.
Karl didn't like that and didn't say anything.
"Or wait until payday," Aaron suggested. "No skin off my nose."
"OK, now and two whenever," Karl agreed. Aaron keyed his pad and aimed it at Karl's. The transfer registered and Karl immediately bought his music.
"Here, take this," Aaron instructed, handing him a standard memory card between thumb and forefinger. It had no printing and could be any size. Probably cheap generic if it didn't have a logo.
"Go down by the cabbage mines, on the tunnel to the elevator. Walk in the tunnel a couple meters and there's a glow panel up high on the wall. Just sit this on top of the panel and leave it there. You're as tall as me, so you can reach it if you stretch. Feel along the top and if there's another one up there bring it back to me."
"Now?" Karl asked.
"You've been paid already haven't you? Now."
"OK, Karl agreed and wolfed down his last couple bites and headed out the back access. He didn't play his new music. He wanted to savor it in his bunk undistracted.
There wasn't anything on top of the light. He felt carefully with his fingers hooked over the back edge and slid it off the end so if it was there he wouldn't knock it off behind. There wasn't any gritty dust which surprised him. He left the card and headed back to the singles barracks.
* * *
April and Jeff were sitting quietly reading. April had some instrumental music on low.
"Well, that didn't take long," Jeff suddenly declared.
April didn't coax him to elaborate. He wouldn't need it as indignant as he sounded.
"North America went from declaring bits as unregistered securities to making their possession illegal and subject to confiscation."
"Of course," April said. "They can't reach you here to prosecute you for issuing them, so after awhile it must have been obvious to them that the people holding them were uninterested in their opinion of their worth or safety. They don't like that. Saying that just made them look silly needlessly."
"So they protect their public by. . . stealing them?"
"What an ugly word," April said. "I've been reading more economic history. When the Nazis were coming to power they shamed the German people into holding their money in Marks. They made it a point of patriotism to do so. They managed to blame the Jews for the bad economy instead of the reparations from the previous war and the tariffs imposed on them. It probably didn't help that the Jews were too smart to keep their wealth in Marks and bought tangibles or sent their money off to Switzerland.
"My point being - don't be surprised if the North Americans start a campaign to blame us for their bad economy. Blaming outsiders is almost a tradition. We did hurt them pretty bad in the war, but they've totally failed at any recovery since. And just that one hit on Vandenberg seems to have hurt them all out of proportion to the size of the strike. The infrastructure was just ridiculously delicate and nobody made any effort to harden it for years and years. In any case the public, at least in the rest of the country, seem to be willing to accept almost any external enemy. They are as reluctant to blame their own leaders as those leaders are to accept the blame. The people in southern California may not be so generous."
"They've been working up to that for a long time," Jeff said. "We've been painted as horrible selfish people in their press for years. It seems easy to incite jealousy in people. I've never seen a documentary that showed how cramped it is in a normal spacer apartment. Nor have I ever heard of a spacer owning twenty pair of shoes or special sets of dinnerware for holidays, things they regard as normal and unsurprising down there."
"So, you don't want to sponsor a counter campaign to try to improve our image?" April asked.
"In North America? The space nuts who sit and watch camera feeds off the habitats, the kids who copied the way you dress and the people who download Lindsey's art we don't need to influence. I think the rest are pretty much unreachable while the government controls the news outlets. It would be a waste of time and money to try."
"Not everyone loves us other places," April reminded him. "My grandparents caught a lot of flak from friends and neighbors over my mom being a spacer."
"Yes, but that was their age group, and their age group's religious objections to life extension. It wasn't the official government policy, and the vast majority of the business community, even older ones, only care if they can profit from trading with us. A lot of young people would come up if they could. So many it scares me."
"I hear you. We can only absorb so many without it changing everything," April agreed.
* * *
The third day into their voyage Happy went down the corridor to take a shower. He stripped and dumped his dirty clothes in the vacuum cleaner to let it pump down and tumble them while he washed. His plastic toiletry kit, with his pad and phone inside, he took into the shower with him to keep them safe. After, he examined his beard and decided it was too early to start trimming it until it showed some more shape, folded and tucked his freshened clothing under an elbow and returned to his cabin.
The clean outfit and kit went on top of the other in the cabinet, and there was nothing for him to do before bed but read a little more of the novel he was working his way through. He glanced over and didn't see any message alerts on the com. He sat back on the bunk, there was no room for a loose chair, and pulled the desktop over to him at an angle that let him lean on it with his forearms.
Before he forgot entirely he stretched to retrieved his pad and keyed in the code to check his camera. It didn't do anything. It should have said, no activity, but it was just a blank screen. When he checked the setting for linked devices the camera was grayed out. The device ran on ambient light and had a mean time to failure of several million hours.
When he looked over he was dismayed to see the camera was visible. It no longer color matched its background. Happy pushed the desktop back and went to the camera. The top was blistered and there were a couple faint sooty marks on the wall beside it. He had to get right down with his nose centimeters away before he picked up a slight scorched odor.
The crew could have told him no personal surveillance equipment was allowed. That wasn't in the lengthy document they supplied about permissible behavior and getting along with fellow passengers and crew. This was simply sneaky. Somebody had come snooping and covered up his only way of knowing who. Someone moderately skilled at finding and disabling spy devices most people would never notice. Somebody carrying an electronic device to kill other small cameras or bots. He just wondered why the person or persons hadn't taken the remains of his camera with them while they were at it?
Happy was briefly sorry he hadn't bought several cameras, or more advanced devices, mobile ones even. He just hadn't pictured finding himself in such an
aggressive environment. He didn't bother looking at the things he's left in the cabin. Anybody at the skill level implied by the evidence would have left no traces. Not even for a crime lab.
Tomorrow he'd do a thorough check to find any newly planted devices. They hadn't been so obvious that they peeled the tape off the com camera built in the desk. But he did check to make sure dark transparent tape hadn't been substituted for black. Almost everybody automatically covered those up and you could demand they stay uncovered all you want and people wouldn't accept it. They'd find improbable excuses to lean or drape something over it, discounting a few hopeful exhibitionists. Get insistent about it, as a few companies had tried, and people got inventive and disgusting about what went over the lens. Tonight he just went back to reading his book.
* * *
"Dave is making me a framework with a grapple post on it," Jeff said. "It has a shell with easy release catches and a heavy duty power cross through to bring in auxiliary power from the ship instead of building it separately. I can tell it's driving him nuts trying to figure out what it is. I'm sure he thinks it's some sort of removable weapon given the power transfer capacity."
April lifted an eyebrow, theatrically.
"Are you sure it couldn't be used as a weapon? You mentioned there will be a disturbance when something jumps out. You'd better be careful where you point it until you know more."
"It would be a very awkward weapon," Jeff objected. "I have no idea what sort of range it would have. The weapon my step-mum created by accident has very limited range. Collapse a gravitational line into the moon or the Earth and it doesn't come out the other side. Neither does it have much power at all just a few centimeters from its axis. Now it's true since it is directional it's not going to follow an inverse square law."
"I sort of assumed it followed the inverse square at right angles." April said.
Jeff actually twitched at that.
"It may. . . " His face changed and then came back. He looked irritated and then awed in rapid succession. "I've learned to take your assumptions of what is obvious very seriously."
"Barak too," he added after a pause. "I can see a way to check exactly what you are describing now. When we get done with this project I'm going to run an experiment in vacuum and get some data on acceleration perpendicular to a collapse line. We need to take a few shots through a massive object, like a lunar mountain, and see just how far it does penetrate."
"In any case a weapon that requires you to get close to your target and then activating it sends you light years away isn't very convenient," April concluded. "But the guts of the thing all fit in a space no bigger than one of your fusion warheads right? Add its own power source and a rocket to deliver it and you can have it activate as it gets close and use it tear the target apart with tidal forces. Not just punch holes in it like your mum's gravity lance. Actually shred it.
"It might be good sometime to have a warhead that doesn't go boom big-time and make a mess and a bright display you can see far away. The mechanism will fly off but you don't need to go with it. If we ever get to where we have all the quantum fluid we want you don't have to go recover it either."
Jeff considered that thoughtfully.
"If we ever have enough fluid to test it, which I don't think is going to happen very soon, it would be nice for a change not to test something by shooting it and hoping it works. But if we ever do that I want a very reliable self destruct on the device. I don't want someone finding it floating along later and reverse engineering it, or just rehabbing it and using it."
"A star monster with deely boppers?" April asked, and reached back behind her head and made them with her index fingers, twitching.
Jeff wasn't amused.
"Make fun after we've visited a few stars and found nobody home."
* * *
Three days later Aaron sent Karl back to check the top of the light. There wasn't anything there and he didn't give Karl anything to drop off. Aaron was so upset that there was nothing there that Karl offered to not count the trip as one of his favors owed. Aaron waved it away and said it wasn't him.
That was good, but for the next couple days Aaron was extra twitchy. Karl just didn't say much and walked on egg shells around him. When he got paid he actually held some back in case Aaron asked and also because he really, really didn't want to get in a bind and have to ask Aaron for a loan or work again when he was so obviously out of sorts.
He'd learned how to cut vegetables into fancy shapes for appetizers, and after work he asked for an omelet one evening and Cook asked him if he looked like his house servant? The man waved at the grill and told him to knock himself out. He'd been surprised Karl made one that only somewhat fell apart. Karl had been watching how it was done. Cook hadn't called Karl a useless dumb ass in days, so things were going pretty well.
When Aaron sent him back again to the tunnel there still wasn't anything to retrieve. There were however a couple security guys blocking his way when he went to return. One held a Taser pointed at him and the other stood further back and held a laser on him. The same sort Heather laid handy to her hand when she'd had him in to talk to her. The fellow didn't lay his finger across the guard either. He had it inside. The crazy thing was he looked afraid of Karl. Then a voice from behind him told him not to turn around and they made him strip down to the buff right in the middle of the public corridor.
They didn't let him get dressed again either. They wanded him and scanned him and gave him a paper robe to put on before they cuffed him. It didn't surprise him when they took him back to Heather. She did not look happy with him.
"First thing, start naming the other dead drops you've been using so my people can check them and set a cam watching them."
"I have no idea what a dead drop is," Karl told her truthfully.
She started to say something and then stopped and looked at him funny.
"The place you went and looked on top of the light. Where else do you go check?"
"Oh, Aaron I work with pays me to run and check it, but he never called it a dead drop."
Heather looked at the lady Dakota, but didn't say anything. Dakota got up and left anyway.
"You've never read spy novels?" Heather asked Karl.
"I don't read books," Karl said, totally unembarrassed.
"Of course not," Heather said with a sigh. She stopped and seemed to be thinking. Maybe this wasn't going to be so bad after all.
"Has Aaron ever had you take anything to the light?" Heather asked.
"Just the first time. He seems to keep expecting something back, but I've checked it three times now and there's never anything. He's been in a lousy mood over it too."
"What did he have you drop off there?" Heather asked. It seemed to irritate her to need to ask.
"A little memory card, like you'd put in your phone," he demonstrated the size with a gap between finger and thumb. "It was a cheapie, no logo on it."
"Didn't it seem. . . irregular to you to be asked to do this?" Heather asked.
"It wasn't regular at all," Karl agreed. "Just whenever he asked."
"What I mean is - it's obviously sneaky. Didn't it occur to you he was doing something wrong?"
Karl shrugged. "Who doesn't sometime? I had to sneak to do stuff with my mom or she was on my case every night. If I wanted pix of girls or the music she didn't like. If I was talking with my friends she didn't like or made a date to go do stuff with them. I kept one card she could look at and another with all my real stuff on it."
Heather looked amazed. "I'm curious. Where did you hide it she wouldn't find it?"
"I just tucked it inside my cheek, on the outside of my teeth. Whichever I wasn't using."
"And you never bit on it and broke it or swallowed it?" Heather asked.
"I swallowed it once in my sleep," Karl admitted. "Looked all around my covers and under the pillow and shook my clothing out. . . " He stopped embarrassed, and didn't describe how he found it. Heather wasn't about to go there.
Heather was a lot shorter with Aaron than him. He tried to say he was working for Karl, and she outright laughed in his face. Karl was so shocked at the nerve of the fellow he stood with his mouth hanging open. Aaron didn't really crack at all until Heather revealed they had the memory Karl had dropped off.
After a long silence he asked, "What happened to the pickup?"
"The driver? He wasn't allow to go back to Armstrong," Heather revealed.
"Are you going to hold him to trade?" Aaron asked hopefully. Perhaps hoping for himself.
"Trade for what? I don't have any spies in Armstrong."
"I find that very hard to believe," Aaron said. That was pretty nervy to contradict your captor.
"All we collect is soft intelligence," Heather informed him. "Whatever workmen and drivers and people with day jobs pick up and occasionally are bright enough to see has value and pass on. We don't have them count things or take pictures or seek specific information. I haven't even released any bots for. . . quite awhile."
Aaron looked thoughtful.
"I just thought you guys were that good," he admitted. That seemed to amuse Heather.
"You're going to be interrogated by brain scan," Heather informed Aaron. "If you have a poison tooth or something you better use it," she said, and the idea didn't seem to bother her.
"We won't bother to ask questions. Word association is faster and easier. And we did the same to the driver so we have a good base line to build from."
"Then a walk down to the cabbage mines mulch room and a shot in the back of the head? Is that what happened to the driver?" Aaron asked.