A Sudden Departure (April Book 9)

by Mackey Chandler

  They didn't have a functioning pump, but melted enough snow to flush it every few days. He'd drained the pump and tank hoping it wasn't damaged, just in case they ever got power again, but he wasn't sure he'd got it empty. The pantry was against an outside wall so everything canned was brought into the kitchen to keep it from freezing and the door kept shut.

  The small stove in the kitchen was fed carefully. It wasn't a cook stove but it had to serve that function now that the propane was gone. Jon ruefully remembered how many times he'd considered his mother's insistence on the small kitchen wood stove a silly waste of space. The wall behind it was now covered with crinkled aluminum foil, pinned up to reflect the heat. When spring came they'd probably wrestle the propane stove outside and put it under a tarp.

  They wore coats most of the day and used every blanket and their sleeping bags at night. Jon thought that without propane they'd never use the main room or bedrooms in winter unless they had two more men stockpiling wood for the season. The ceiling was so high all your heat went straight up. It looked great in sales brochures but most of these cottages saw little winter use. To make it livable they'd have to put in a drop ceiling, and who knew where they'd get the materials for that now?

  If they hadn't taken these measures early he'd probably have been burning the bedroom walls and furniture to survive. The snow was too deep to harvest any new wood. As it was he intended to drop trees uphill and get the logs drying as soon as the snow was down to knee deep. Being on the south slope would help enormously. That hadn't been a critical consideration when the place was built. All they'd cared about then was the view.

  * * *

  "What I'd propose is we take Dionysus' Chariot out as an observation platform. We can put the drone through some tests and be within range to record everything. A couple days flight time. Far enough that directly observing it from Home would be difficult.

  "I'd like to come along," Dave said.

  "We have four seats, but can you be away from your business that long?" Jeff asked.

  "They seem to think so, to hear them on the shop floor. I suppose it's time to find out. If they can't deal with things for five or six days maybe I should know."

  "Your accompanying us will draw attention to our project," April warned.

  "Nah. . . If I go aboard early when I'm delivering stuff anyway and just don't come off with my guys the dock hands don't keep count," Dave said. "There won't be anybody from Security checking passengers off like a shuttle. Nobody will notice if we don't make a big show of boarding together. You guys are public figures. I'm just one of the workers nobody notices.

  "And when we come back?" April asked.

  "Same thing. You guys get off together and depart. Anybody like a newsie will leave then or even trail after you. My guys come on and none of them are bright enough to count three guys in blue coveralls coming off instead of two."

  "We'll have the pilot, Deloris, too," Jeff reminded them. He didn't absolutely need her for this test, but he was evaluating her right along with the equipment.

  "Good, you use the same style suit as her and get on and off a few times with the helmet semi-polarized and they'll be thoroughly confused. My crew will all mirror our spex and I'll have one of my boys wear a knit hat and trade it off to me when we unload. People don't look."

  "I never knew you had this devious side to you," April told Dave.

  "Thank you." He took it for a compliment from her.

  * * *

  The four of them were forty eight hours out from launch. Dionysus' Chariot carried the drone grappled to limit how much onboard fuel capacity they'd needed to design into it. Six hours ago they had disengaged from the drone, attached the now modified drive module, and let it make a small burn to separate and open up some distance from them for safety. The combined velocity wasn't that great, but that was part of the test to see what would happen without a high velocity vector.

  Carrying the drone externally also allowed them to put a toilet module and a zero G mini-kitchen in the hold spaces. It made the test flight somewhat more comfortable but no luxury cruise. They had coffee and a variety of precooked low residue meals and snacks.

  Jeff indicated he'd start some tests when the drone was two thousand kilometers from them. The margin of safety was enhanced in his opinion because he's have the drone oriented away from them. He was seated in the rear pair of seats with April. You could still see out the forward ports almost as well as the front pair and he didn't have to share a view of his screen, which had some readings that revealed entirely too much about the device on the drone.

  "What do you expect it to do?" Dave asked. He'd been holding that question in until now.

  "It may do nothing. That would still be an important datum. I'm going to increase the. . . well, power isn't exactly true. Field strength. Which isn't a linear function of the power input. At some point we may see some effect from a stronger distortion in the gravitational field. The original device, before we modified it, was basically either full on, or off. I can control this fairly finely. In one percent increments easily. I don't really want to discuss how that is achieved with the internal design of the system we put in the drone."

  "I probably wouldn't understand how it works it anyhow," Dave said.

  "We don't entirely understand it," Jeff said. "But it works, which is enough right now. I've checked that the onboard navigation is functioning. It is oriented at a portion of the sky that has nothing within fifty light years, a couple degrees in any direction from the aim point. No large mass to latch onto for a quantum transition. Question is – What will it do if we can get it to jump in those conditions? Will it vanish to some point so unimaginably distant that there can be no recovery?

  "The auto-pilot is designed to turn the vessel over and bring it back towards us. But if it is far enough away, the tiny errors in aiming back at us or in how far it jumps coming back could easily have it appear outside the range at which we can detect it."

  "Are you sure two thousand kilometers is enough?" April asked, uneasy.

  "No, but the further away we are the higher the chance it will be undetectable if it doesn't return exactly. More than absolute distance I'm counting on the vastness of space and our own low mass to protect us. It's not going to latch on to something this small coming back at us.

  "It's like an archer firing an arrow across a big field, and having another bowman return it from where it falls. It would take a lot of luck at three hundred meters to get an actual hit.

  "It will be transmitting a pulse every few seconds. If it jumps a very short distance we may be able to detect that. We carefully picked a frequency that won't get any radio astronomers unnecessarily excited. If we recover the device after a jump I'll test it again as long as we don't seem in danger of losing it. If we don't recover it then it is set to self destruct quickly."

  "Why quickly?" Dave asked.

  "If it materializes in a distant star system, I'd consider it an attractive nuisance. Appearing suddenly a technological civilization might investigate it. I don't want them to have time to be close before it destroys itself. Somebody might come to harm and blame us."

  "And you don't want to share the tech with them," April added.

  "I thought that part of it was obvious," Jeff said. "I'm starting at a nominal five percent. The device will cycle within a few milliseconds after a radio pulse. If it jumps straight ahead and appears within about five degrees of where our dish is aimed it can lock on it and it will show up on your screens when we detect it. The clock counting down on your screen will be to the next whole minute."

  "Five seconds from, mark," Jeff noted. The number reached zero and nothing happened.

  "Well, that's interesting," Jeff said.

  April noticed Deloris closed her faceplate when the count started. She was impressed. None of them knew what was about to happen, but Deloris was in command of the ship. If something bad happened she'd bought herself at least a full second to be doing something useful inst
ead of seeing to her own survival.

  "Trying it again at ten percent," Jeff said and counted it off again. Nothing happened.

  "Nothing. Telemetry unchanged," Jeff said.

  Deloris noticed Jeff wasn't surprised at all at the first failure, but his voice definitely had a disappointed tone at the second failure.

  "A Solar says we get some action in the next two shots," Deloris said.

  "Ms Wrigley. When I asked Barak how I should deal with you as a person, he had very little to say, but he advised me never to bet against you, and added that if I did win a bet against you and heard the words "Double or nothing?" from your mouth to run. No thank you," Jeff said.

  "Just trying to make it interesting," Deloris protested.

  "I'm quite fascinated by the whole thing without more financial risk than is already sitting in that drone," Dave informed her. That got a nod.

  "Third try, going to fifteen percent," Jeff said. He didn't bother giving a five second call this time. Everybody knew the drill by now.

  "Gone. . . " Jeff declared off his screen feed. Three seconds later there was no new radio pulse to be seen on screen.

  "There! Radio pulse detected, and another. But there was a hair more than a six second delay," Jeff said. "Auto detected so it's not far off dead ahead. Three second added delay means it's about ninety thousand kilometers away."

  "Damn. . . so it didn't jump out for the third galaxy away," Deloris said.

  "This is much more useful," Dave pointed out.

  "I have some major thoughts on this I'd like to share with you later," April told Jeff.

  Jeff looked at her, surprised she specified later, but didn't argue.

  "It should flip over and," – an easily visible light winked briefly in front of them and slightly to the side out the front ports – "return."

  "That's freaky," Deloris declared. "It was here again, and then its radio own pulse caught up with it from out there," she said. She was right, there was a double pulse on the screen.

  "Fifteen hundred kilometers away and about five hundred off axis," Jeff said. "It has retained its motion away from us."

  "Too close," April worried.

  "Should I take it out a bit further away for a twenty percent jump?" Jeff asked.

  "No closer, that's for sure," April urged.

  "I wouldn't do twenty percent," Dave counseled. "What if it's not a linear effect? It may take it beyond reach or return. Since you can adjust it accurately just go for sixteen or seventeen percent."

  April and Deloris agreed. Jeff agreed readily and set the drone to come back on axis and allow it to continue to ease away. They waited for it to do so with a fuel conserving maneuver. There wasn't a bunch of chatter while they waited. Everyone was thoughtful. April went in the hold and brought sandwiches and drinks for those who wanted them.

  "There, it's back in line and beyond two thousand kilometers again," Jeff announced. "Going to seventeen percent as suggested."

  It vanished again.

  They waited. Fifteen seconds later Jeff spoke up. "Any delay in reappearing beyond this we're likely out of range with our dish. I hope I didn't lose the whole thing."

  "There, it's back." Jeff said finally. "Three thousand kilometers out. Doppler says it lost some velocity away from us but picked up some radial to our long axis. It's over forty degrees off our nose." Nobody saw the flash this time since they were looking straight ahead.

  "As far off center as it is away," Jeff read off the instruments. "I'll nudge it back to us. It won't be much of a wait because that ends our trials. I can expend the fuel to hurry it back to us. I'm afraid I'd lose it next try,"

  "Even if you have to make minimum jumps, this would get you around the solar system very quickly," Dave said.

  "Yes, but we need some new trials with better instrumentation," Jeff said. "We need cameras and the ability to take star sightings from the drone so we can both navigate it and check where it has been when it's recovered. We need to learn how it jumps pointed right at a large mass like Jupiter, or slightly to the side We don't want to jump towards a gas giant and find ourselves half way to the core of the planet."

  "That makes sense. Grapple it back on us and head home then," Dave said. "I'll be happy to start modifying it for you."

  * * *

  Dave called Jeff two weeks later, Jeff didn't have the modified package ready to test in the drone, so he wasn't expecting a call. He thought he'd be the one initiating the next call. It turned out to be something else.

  "James Weir's partners called and wanted to talk about building a bigger, better equipped ship along the same general lines of the lost Pedro Escobar."

  "I'm not surprised," Jeff said. "They have evidence it works at least outbound. If they didn't have the funds for a rebuild I was expecting they'd be able to raise the money from others now. I wouldn't be surprised if we see other attempts to reproduce his success. After all, his basic paper on the subject is public and spread all over the data nets too far to recall. There are other players with deep pockets, big corporations and governments who can step in."

  Dave grimaced. "I wouldn't assume that. I've been looking online beyond the original news stories. In fact I had my secretary pay to expand the search my clipping service does for the aerospace boards that I already watch for ship building. The only place with a consistently positive view of the ship disappearing are the space nut boards. The government sites basically say if there was anything to it we'd have already done it. They back up that assertation with lots of assurance from physicists that Weir's original paper is flawed and not accepted by the mainstream community."

  "Where do they think the ship went?" Jeff asked.

  "They commonly say a catastrophic failure would explain its disappearance, or fraud."

  "Well, that still leaves Weir's original partners working on it," Jeff mused aloud.

  "Yes, but not with my help. They seemed to assume I would leak all the information about their design if we no longer had a business relationship. They got quite nasty towards the last. I ended up telling them that they were so offensive I no longer wanted to work with them even when our shop calendar was open again. They have no cause to be that way. I met all my obligations to them."

  "Earth Think," Jeff said simply. "They will seek partners that they can supposedly control inside their own legal system, instead of simply trust."

  "I don't like a blanket saying like Earth Think. I like to judge people as individuals," Dave said. "But at some point you do have to notice traits held in common," he added, very unhappily.

  "Did you suggest there are a number of other small shops they could deal with. Some trained by you?" Jeff asked.

  "I did, and he seemed to think that was insane. I explained we all send work around when we're too busy and some fellows have specialties at which they are better. I don't think that made a dent on his world view. All he can see is that they are competitors," Dave said. "It's a lot different than Earth because we're all running behind with as much business as we could want. We're not all scrambling to get a little slice of the pie. "I'll be honest. If any of the guys who went into business out of my shop ask me whether Weir's partners were OK to work with I'm going to tell them how easily they assumed I'd do them dirty."

  "They probably can't imagine you frankly consulting with each other like that either," Jeff said. "Fierce competitors are naturally secretive and won't share honest advice. Well, there's one good thing. When we do get our ship built it will be obvious it is different than Weir's. He can't possibly accuse you of having leaked the design elements, because it won't look anything like his did with those open reactors."

  "Yeah, those were pretty neat looking though," Dave admitted. "You know, if they don't use any Home companies, there just aren't a lot of other space based builders. And the ground based ones they are usually government contractors first, and hard to get a slot in their calendar for private work."

  "That's fine," Jeff said. "It gives us a little more time
and I don't want to rush this. Not only will I refuse to fly it if it's risky, I don't want to kill some idiot. Even if he volunteers."

  "If you kill an idiot you'll almost certainly lose the ship too," Dave reminded him.

  "Yes, and we can ill afford that," Jeff agreed.

  Chapter 23

  April got a call on com. It was a double buzz, so not the half dozen she'd stop to open no matter what, but still one of a dozen and a half who were important to her.

  "Can I bring around a proof of the second helmet drawing with your grandpa for your approval?" Lindsey Pennington asked.

  "Right now?" April asked, then on thinking about it a little more asked, "Maybe you should be asking him for the approval. It's basically his memory that it should be checked against."

  "I figured it will be on your wall, but I can see that. Let me put it this way. Would you check it for your satisfaction with it as art, and if it passes that, then we can ask him to judge it for his taste in art and for historic accuracy too."

  "That works," April agreed. "You don't want to just send me a file?"

  "You're not going to display it on a screen. I'll show you a physical copy," Lindsey insisted.

  "OK, there's nothing really going on I can't interrupt. Go ahead and come over when you want," April allowed. Lindsey, April realized, was one of those awkward people who wanted to be closer to you, than you wanted to be to them. It was irritating sometimes. It wasn't that she didn't like her, it was simply that they had such a small overlap in their interests and lives that April had no desire to be constantly finding things to do together.

  Still, she wanted to stay on good enough terms to do business with the young woman. Her work was superb and if she felt snubbed she probably wouldn't accept commissions. April made the extra effort to call for a courier to go by the cafeteria and fetch a couple nice desserts for them. Whatever the feature was to go with dinner today. Then she put a kettle on low. Lindsey was a tea drinker instead of coffee.