A Sudden Departure (April Book 9)

by Mackey Chandler

  "It feels that long ago, doesn't it? I was prudish and a little embarrassed to go shower, and then shocked when your mom had a male friend over who just came out to breakfast with us unconcerned."

  "And you conned him out of his cuff-links. But I've changed a little bit too. Come on, I'm tired, and no you don't stink," she said seeing the objection coming, "and if you did I'm as bad as you. The housekeeper will change the sheets so it doesn't matter. But you get the outside this time so you can sneak off to shower if you wake first."

  "OK," April agreed. Too tired to argue.

  * * *

  Heather stirred behind April and woke her up. "What's that odor?" April asked. She had a keen nose, never ruined by polluted Earth air. "It's sort of nutty. Some kind of food, but I can't place it."

  "Ah! Oatmeal. I forgot to tell Amy not to come in. She just automatically makes my oatmeal."

  "That's fine, It smells better than the oatmeal I make. I'm starved for anything," April declared.

  "She just makes a single serving. I'll go tell her to make a real breakfast. Jeff would be polite but oatmeal would just be an appetizer for him. I'll go before I shower and tell her to make eggs and pancakes and whatever meat we have in the freezer. Or get some from the cafeteria."

  Heather trotted off barefoot on the cool floor wearing the long t-shirt she slept in. When she came back she invited April to shower first, but she declined.

  "She informed me she ate the oatmeal when I didn't get up. That's fine, we'll have a real breakfast in a half hour or so," Heather promised.

  April dressed better than Heather expected, a black tunic with a bold pattern woven in the cloth and tights. Heather kept her plainer outfit on. It would seem like she was trying to compete to change now.

  Amy had an impressive pile of pancakes made and scrambled eggs and sausage on platters. Jeff joined them with his hair still wet. Jeff looked like he was busting to talk but looked at Amy uncertain and just thanked her for the cooking and issued general good morning greetings to April and Heather that didn't sound like him at all. He looked at Heather, alert, but when she didn't tell him to speak up he turned his attention to the food and waited to speak freely.

  "You can have the rest of the day off," Heather informed Amy. "We'll see to our own supper. We may just go to the cafeteria. It's good to be seen there so people don't imagine I'm sitting at home dining on lobster and sweet corn fresh off the shuttle."

  "I'd have no objection to that, if you're sharing with us," Jeff said.

  "If you were king the peasants would soon start building guillotines," Amy informed him.

  Jeff looked shocked, unaware of Amy's blunt ways. One hand crept up and felt his neck.

  "People expect the sovereign to have certain privileges," Heather told him. "However Amy is right. If you make a show of lavish living it builds resentment. Are you familiar with Marie Antoinette?"

  "Uh. . . lead singer for the Pico Pirates?" Jeff guessed.

  "Look her up," Heather insisted with a disgusted look, and let it drop.

  "You have batter in the fridge if that isn't enough pancakes," Amy said. "Shall I plan on three for breakfast tomorrow?"

  "I'll message you on com," Heather said. "I've a new policy. I'm taking more personal time, sanity time, and delegating more. I may even take a few days to go back to Home with my friends."

  "Good!" Amy said, warmly approving. "I'll check. When you take a break, I get a break. It's good for everybody."

  After they heard her go out, Jeff looked up at the kitchen screen and frowned. "Why the odd sticky note in the corner, that looks like a safety notice?"

  Heather turned and looked. It said: "Days without oatmeal. One!"

  * * *

  Jeff speared a couple more sausages and looked around at the walls suspiciously. "Can we speak freely now?" he asked.

  "It's safe," Heather assured him. "I have it checked every day, and both those hunter bots you sent me are active. We haven't had an incursion in weeks. But you can't talk and eat. Not to tell me a big story, and I got the impression you had an adventure. Enjoy the food while it's hot."

  Jeff ate but he looked around even harder.

  "The one has a habit of lurking behind the big spider plant hanging in the great room, the other can turn up anywhere. He will go down to floor level and the other never does now. I know you programmed them to learn, but it's like they have different personalities now," Heather said.

  "They only have two petabyte. I don't think you can write a personality in that," Jeff objected.

  "Maybe it's in my mind," Heather admitted. "I could be anthropomorphizing them." But I swear the one who hides behind the spider plant has more personality than one of our rover drivers."

  Jeff shoveled in more breakfast for awhile, looking thoughtful.

  "I could probably write a pretty good rover driver in two petabyte," he decided.

  "I'm stuffed," April announced. "Do you want me to tell her?" she asked Jeff, who was still eating.

  "I'm not quite ready to hear a big complicated story," Heather admitted. "After a while."

  Jeff looked surprised, and had the wisdom to keep his mouth shut for a change. April was the one who asked, "What would you like to do?"

  "Go back to bed."

  "I think I'm full. . . enough," Jeff announced, and made a show of pushing his plate away.

  * * *

  The lunch rush was over and Karl was sure for the first time in a couple hours nothing was about to run out. There were clean plates, plenty of silverware, the napkin holders were full. The floor in front of the counter was dry and the cleaning bot had been turned loose to make a couple passes when there was no line. The condiments and coffee concentrate were topped off. Cook hadn't yelled at him once today. That was two days in a row.

  Karl looked up and Heather was coming in the cafeteria with a couple he didn't know. He turned slowly, making no sudden motion to call attention to himself, and walked in the back. He stopped just out of sight and peeked out of the service entry carefully.

  A big hand landed on his shoulder.

  "I didn't release you for lunch, but it is pretty slow. . . "

  Cook looked at his face funny.

  "You look scared to death, boy. What's wrong?" Karl was breathing kind of fast and gripping the prep table.

  "Heather just came in and I didn't want her to see me," Karl admitted.

  "She's the one who sent you here," Cook said, reasonably. "She knows you're here. She does come in pretty regularly. You just didn't see her working in the back, but you're going to see her out front. Central is pretty small. No matter what you do you're going to run into her now and then unless you get a weird off shift job outside pressure or something."

  "I'm sorry, I just didn't want her to see me. Everything is going pretty good," Karl said. "Why remind her I even exist?"

  "I don't think she's as fearsome as you have built up in your mind, but I can tell you're really upset. Go on in the back and get some lunch. Get yourself calmed down, no reason to panic. Take some extra lunch time and they'll be gone soon enough," Cook said and gave him a hearty slap on the shoulder.

  Karl nodded thanks, and took a few steps towards the back, but turned around.

  "Cook, it's not her. I hate to have her see me because I'm starting to understand how badly I screwed up. That's all she's going to remember so soon. Maybe if I don't screw up again for awhile, for a long time, she won't think I'm still a dumb ass."

  "Well. . . one can always hope," Cook agreed. "Go on with you," he said, shooing him off to lunch.

  * * *

  "My salad is really good," April said, "better than we get at Home."

  "Salad stuff has to be dead fresh or it suffers. We try to get it to you within two days, but it's hard. We have other high value freight that bumps greens and mushrooms off until the next shuttle, and some things like zukes and carrots are standby already.

  April frowned and rolled it over with her fork.

  "I thin
k it has some stuff in it we don't get."

  Heather leaned over and really looked at it.

  "The one frilly green there, actually it's kind of red, that's a lettuce that we don't have enough yet for export. The other little pieces with the very plump leaves are purslane. It's considered a weed in North America, but growing like a weed is a plus. It grows nice and flat. It has enough of a peppery flavor you might notice it. The only trouble with it is you need to strip the leaves off the older stems by hand. Call it experimental. Anything that needs much hand processing is iffy. We may give up on it as a cash crop."

  "Rabbit food," Jeff teased, but the truth was he'd piled enough lettuce, cucumber, tomato and onion on his sandwich, to make it a salad in all but name.

  "I remember when you didn't have a decent shower here, but eventually Central is going to be more comfortable than Home. You have the room to do things we can't," April said.

  "Home will have luxuries," Heather said, "but it will be like living in Tokyo, you'll pay through the nose for them. I'm going to come see you guys more often. I was being a little irrational about it."

  "I was actually thinking we need to come see you more often," April said.

  "I see the value of both ideas," Jeff said. For once he could agree with everybody.

  "Yes, and I know what lens you are peering through," Heather accused. She made a little circle with her thumb and finger and made a swirling motion before her eye, and then winked at Jeff through it.

  Jeff smiled and started to say something, probably witty from his grin, them went wide eyed with wonder, his mouth in a silent 'o'. He grabbed his pad and started to open it then stopped.

  "I need to get back to your apartment where I can use the hard wired access to search with some real security, not here," Jeff said, looking paranoid again.

  "This is about. . . the story April told me?" Heather asked. Then she was irritated with herself. Paranoia was catching. Nobody was going to snoop on her in the cafeteria. Nevertheless she got dessert in a take-away container while Jeff stood fidgeting, anxious to go.

  Chapter 15

  Jeff sat at Heather's com console and plugged his pad in. The women sat close but didn't press him or look over his shoulder. They made coffee, better than the cafeteria's, and ate their dessert. Jeff let his sit, focused on his idea.

  It was an unusually long time before Jeff shut the screen down. He finally turned to them.

  "I remembered the key words and general locations of the documents I wanted, but the extra time involved was setting up their retrieval through other parties and Earth accounts, so they aren't traced back to my accounts on Home. Chen will have some of his European agents buy them and forward them through third parties. Some of the papers are behind pay walls, and I don't want anyone watching me closely to see a sudden interest in these old papers. Especially since they probably haven't had that many copies retrieved for years."

  "You haven't told us why you suddenly needed to do this," Heather reminded him.

  "I'm sorry, I thought the only important thing happening was obvious. It has to do with the parameters of the quantum transition, jump that is," he corrected quickly for April.

  "By James Weir's numbers we should not have been able to tunnel through to Alpha Centauri. If you simply substitute gravitation for the electric field. Even with a small boost from the drive setting up a charge, it's not near enough. It kept bugging me and working at the back of my mind. Then when Heather gestured like looking through a lens and moved it in a circle I remembered.

  "Back closer to the turn of the century there was a theory put forth to explain anomalies observed between the observed amount of matter and known properties of our universe. It was suggested gravity isn't a perfect inverse square force to infinity, but rather acts stronger at long distances than predicted. There was even some observational data that was put forward to support it. Gravitational lensing," Jeff made the same motion with a closed finger and thumb in front of his eye Heather had, "around distant galaxies."

  "So what happened to the theory?" April asked.

  "First of all nobody liked it. It would have required huge changes in theory and nobody had new changes handy to plug in. Rejecting the accepted model is hard enough to get people to consider when you have an alternative to suggest. Getting them to accept they have no idea at all how to describe reality and then ask them to wait around for something new to be advanced is wildly unpopular.

  "It would have rendered all the accepted models as quaint historical steps along the way to a newer modern model, including the work of a lot of living people. Their status and financial security could even be threatened. Immediately, a lot of the theories about the distances to far galaxies and objects beyond started being questioned."

  "So they came up with a better theory?" Heather asked.

  "Not really. We still don't have a theory that doesn't have some sort of excess matter in the universe. And we've never been able to directly test the forces over longer distances. Even checking from here to Jupiter is like checking across a couple centimeters and then applying it to galactic scales."

  "But we just checked in on a much bigger scale, right? April asked.

  "Well, not a galactic scale yet, but big enough to show there is some difference from what is expected on the scale of just a few light-years. We now see what happens when we have very large distinct masses a few light years apart, with no competing targets for any reasonable distance behind them, and no significant targets that aren't some large angular deviation from the line of motion. We still have no idea how it works for tens or hundreds of light years.

  "The worst that might have happened with the Centauri system is we might have ended up near Proxima, but we'd have still known where we were, and easily turned around. Sol and Earth were an easy target because the sun was still in line behind them, there are no large competing masses like a binary system has, and nothing close behind. Jupiter might alter your entry if you come in on just the right angle close to it, but that's about it.

  "I wouldn't want to see what would happen if you aimed at a distant group of stars all presenting within a very small angle and all of similar mass. You'd have little chance of predicting which one you'd tunnel to and at what distance. When you turned around and looked for Sol, you'd have a similar problem. You might be able to get back in the same neighborhood by successively smaller jumps if you could find Sol by spectroscopy after your first return jump."

  "You're welcome," April said.

  "I beg your pardon?" Jeff didn't get the non sequitur.

  "You're welcome. You wanted to just activate and jump on an almost random heading out there," April said, making a vague waving motion. "I urged you to pick a specific target."

  "Indeed you saved us a world of trouble," Jeff agreed. "I hadn't planned on. . . " He seemed lost for words. "Such a sudden departure." April just glared at him for choosing such a mild, self-serving euphemism for a colossal screw up.

  Heather looked horrified. She hadn't heard that detail before.

  "How will we gauge risk?" Heather asked. "What are the chances a ship will jump and not end up where they were aiming?"

  "That's a really good question," Jeff admitted. "This is why I wanted to see the old papers, to see if any of their math will give me a start on just answering that question. But when you come right down to it, we will have to send ships to other stars, at different distances, and with various separation from their neighbors, and see what happens. The jump system Weir made will need to be put through the same process. We'll have to build up a database of experience."

  "Not with me flying it you're not," April said. "I have no desire to be one of those outliers that teach you something by disappearing."

  Heather just nodded her agreement with that.

  "This idea about keeping the tech as a trade secret needs a lot more discussion too," Heather demanded. "Prolonged discussion. I'm going to take a few days and come back to Home with you so we can talk face to face a
bout it. Also, I'm seeing I need time off now and then, and right now there's still some pent up. . . demand.

  "I'd love to have you," April said with no hesitation. "As long as you're sure they won't pull a coup if you are gone a few days."

  "More likely Dakota will call begging me to come back by the second day. You know, I didn't ask for this job," Heather reminded her. "It was thrust upon me in an emergency. All I really wanted to do was sell some lots and make money."

  * * *

  Jeff enclosed his gravitational module in a its custom freight container, including the grapple he unbolted from the deck. The strong container was closed and well locked, before he allowed the Chariot's hold to be opened. They handed it over to the dock workers at the north hub to forward to their new cubic. Well, newly owned cubic. Escorting it themselves or even worse, bring in armed security, would call entirely too much attention to it.

  The dock worker read the mass written in the document window and gave a gentle push against it to confirm that it felt right.

  "Any special instructions or cautions?" the man asked, a little nosy.

  "No, nothing delicate," Jeff assured him. "It's just our holding oven. We've been out making pizza deliveries." That was a gentle rebuke. If it needed hazard stickers Jeff would have applied them. The man gave a forced smile as if that was witty.

  "You can leave it in the airlock. The outer door will open once to 578319," Jeff told him. I just set it from my pad."

  "Got it," the fellow agreed. He considered the crate. "You sure it will clear the hatch?"

  "With two centimeters to spare," Jeff assured him. "It was custom built to fit." Indeed the module had that as a design restraint too, because he didn't want to have to loosen an exterior bulkhead to get it in and out. There was only a coffin lock in the outside bulkhead.

  The fellow nodded satisfied. That question was reasonable, smart even.

  It felt like old times sailing down the zero G corridors of North hub together. They weren't going to their recently bought cubic however, they were headed to April's place.

  "I have enough in the fridge for lunch later," April said. "No need to go out until later."