* * *
Jeff was gone for three days with Dionysus' Chariot. Their own people were getting suspicious that something unusual was going on. He kept requiring the use of the ship for mysterious errands whenever it wasn't making freight runs. More than ever before. When he returned from the latest trials he was satisfied, and promised to try not to take the ship again before they had a dedicated vessel for the star drive.
"We can navigate around a star system very rapidly now. We're not constrained by the need to build up velocity and shed it like the electric model drive. We also determined we can jump while under acceleration. As far as we can measure it doesn't change a thing. It's frustrating not to use it, but the Chariot is needed, and the Hringhorni will be much more suited to the task.
"A lot of it is now computerized. You can tell the onboard AI where you want to go and it can display a range of likely paths and let you decide the safety margin you wish. As we collect data from actual use the range will become narrower and more accurate.
"We'll need our own internal licensing standards," April said. "If we ever make this public I want to be able to show we were consistent and responsible in who we let pilot."
"Absolutely," Jeff agreed. "You can help write the manuals and standards."
"This changes everything," April said.
"It will, when it becomes public," Jeff said. "I did a lot more thinking on that while we were doing trials.
"What were your conclusions?" April asked, hoping he'd move along to a summary.
"If we turn this tech loose right now we'll be swamped with a wave of people from Earth to every corner of the Solar system and beyond. Most will be under the control of Earth governments. They'll bring all their conflicts right along with them. I can see interstellar war as a real possibility in a couple generations.
"I'm even more certain I want to hold the tech close as long as possible. It's not like we'd be denying them the stars. They have the start of a workable system already. We'd just be refusing to help them along faster. I fear faster would be a disaster for us and them too."
"If we keep it to ourselves, when it becomes known later a lot of people will hate us," April said. "Are you prepared to deal with that?"
"They already hate us," Jeff said. "I'm trying to keep them from being everywhere before we have a chance to get there. I want us to be so established and far ahead of them it doesn't matter if they hate us. Let them tell the herd anything they want, as long as they don't touch us. The smart ones will figure it out. It'll help filter who comes to us even."
"I'm not sure there is a good choice here, but I'll go along with you," April promised. "Heather has made clear that's how she leans already. She's called the Earthies slavers a few times in my hearing."
"She has a point, if bluntly made. How many countries can you walk into a spaceport and slap down cash and come to Home or the moon?" Jeff asked. "How is that different from a serf who couldn't leave the estate?"
April sighed. "The hovels have gotten nicer, most places. Heather rules her own dominion absolutely. That still bothers me some times."
"She knows it too," Jeff said. "Sometimes it just isn't possible to be nice. People won't let you, no matter how hard you try."
"Like Vandenberg," April said, tight lipped.
"You could have let them shoot me," Jeff allowed.
"You don't sound sincere," April accused.
"I wasn't even trying."
* * *
Victor showed up again in a couple weeks, working on extending his survey for the promised map of the area. They let him sleep by the stove, before he went beyond them. He brought his own food and insisted on giving them a small gift of a local herbal tea. He had a deck of cards and they played a game of Rummy before going to bed. Jon and Jenny had played cards before, but it was a new thing to the others.
"I thought he was going to have one of his adopted boys ride out mapping," Jon said, after he left in the morning.
"They are ten and twelve," Jenny said looking at him funny. "The twelve year old hasn't got the sense to be trusted alone yet he told me, and certainly not to risk a horse to his keeping. Maybe next year he said, maybe not."
"Well that was more pleasant than having his kid in any case," Jon said.
"Men. . . "Jenny said, tight lipped, "miss the obvious."
"What?" Jon asked, wondering what he'd done.
"Are you aware Victor is single?" Jenny asked.
"Well no. He mentioned his family, but not a wife. I sort of assumed. . . "
"You assumed too much. You watch, Mr. Foy will find reason to pass through here every few months. He has his eye on Eileen. He was very impressed with how she found a safe hidey hole for them and survived just fine. She's smart too. Did you see how fast she learned the card game?" Jenny asked.
"Eileen is much too young," Jon said indignantly. "And he's too old for her."
"I'm sure he's aware she's barely fourteen. She'll be sixteen so fast you'll wonder how it happened, and he just made sure she'll know him before she meets any of the other young men at this fall fair thing. Things have changed if you haven't noticed. In rougher times people marry younger and for different more practical reasons. We don't have any history books, but you had an education," Jenny said, sharply. "Remember Shakespeare if not the history texts. Kids marry earlier in an agricultural society. We've reverted," Jenny assured him.
"He'd still be too old," Jon objected.
"Do you really want to marry her off to some green kid barely older than her? Somebody with no assets and fewer skills? It's a rough dangerous world out there again. There's no phone with police and fire on the other end. But I think the kicker is she'll probably look at a couple seventeen or eighteen year olds at the fairs and see they look like boys beside Vic. And of course Barney and Cindy will weigh in. There may be other mature competition too," Jenny speculated, "but the days of TV style romance between high school sweethearts are gone for a long time I'm afraid."
Jon scowled and didn't argue. She was probably right, but he didn't like it.
* * *
Happy was tickled to get outside and tour a construction site. He intended to requisition a rover out at the site and go beyond the work zone far enough to get a feel for the planet. He knew there wasn't any area within a hundred kilometers of the colony that was true wilderness. It was all surveyed from the air and known down to any stone thirty millimeters across, if you wanted to search the high definition photos. But you could turn off a track and go to where you couldn't see any other rover tracks still easily enough. He'd be satisfied with that.
The supply people hadn't been immediately helpful. They had questioned whether he needed an assigned suit and suggested he might not get outside enough to warrant that and should use one of the community suits. He asked the young man if he personally used community underwear. The fellow boggled at him a moment and stopped arguing. Then he was dismayed to see they stored the suits in lockers without individual locks. He intended to ask the workers how they felt about that, and how long it had been going on.
He had to requisition a lock and they tried to give him one with a set number the user couldn't randomize. The irritated stock jockey asked him if Happy didn't trust him?
"Not worth a damn, nor your security, nor everybody in however big a mob has access to all your data including this lock number," Happy answered truthfully. "And. . . I'm your new boss," he informed the fellow with his best intimidating gaze. He got his lock and reset the number.
He'd gone to the dressing room and found his suit and locked it in his assigned locker. That was yesterday. Today he'd come early so he could do a thorough suit inspection before riding out to the job site in one of three rovers scheduled to go to the site.
The suit design was new to him, but pretty much like a moon suit. There wasn't enough atmospheric pressure on Mars to matter between here and hard vacuum. The suit was designed for maximum mobility for workers, but special attention to safety in construction wo
rk. Happy wouldn't hesitate to use it with a little extra thought and care on the Martian moons or in orbit, except they probably prohibited that.
It wasn't a new suit but it had been blown out a couple weeks with ionized air and supposedly inspected. Happy took the helmet off and sniffed. It wasn't odorless, but it didn't reek of perfume or garlic or mold. He'd used much worse. The helmet faceplate was diamond coated and didn't have a scratch. The hinges for the flip down filters were tight. Those got a lot of wear. It had decals on the back of the helmet saying 104. The same numbers were silk screened across the shoulders. They were cracking a bit but good for a couple more years. He toyed with the idea of having 'Happy' or 'Boss' added below the number. Maybe after people got to know him.
Happy removed the gauntlets and inspected the locking flanges with care. They were unaltered from the factory and he'd leave them that way here. His personal suit he's sold back on Home had all the flange edges radiused and polished. He did the same inspection with the boots and helmet mating surfaces. He removed the over-boots and inspected the actual pressure holding surface.
The forearms were armored since that was the likely area a worker would cut his own suit open working with power tools. There was a patch like that over the knees and on the front of the thighs. The over-boots could stand being run right over with a rover and protect your toes. All the other areas, especially where it flexed, Happy inspected every square centimeter.
The environmental rack on the back could hold one of three systems. A single bottle of air that lasted about four hours and had high losses from venting, but was very light. They would let somebody use that climbing an antenna tower or a crane. More commonly workers used a dual bottle of oxygen with a carbon dioxide scrubber that could last about twelve hours. The bottles had to be switched manually, but the usual drill was to stop at lunch, switch to your reserve bottle and rack the empty in a cage for those bottles on site. Then you picked up a fresh bottle for a new reserve so you always had a back up.
There were also cryogenic units that had a liquid oxygen reserve and a nanotech carbon dioxide filter. They would last four days of heavy activity, and exploration rovers had a unit on board to recharge them. They required too much maintenance and expense to use for everyday.
His suit had the carbon dioxide absorber installed, but the hose was not screwed down. He could look in the port and the seal film was still intact from the last refurbish. It had two bottles onboard already. The full bottle had an indicator on it that clicked over when you installed it on the active side and connected it to the regulator set. It took a key to reset. But once in the rack you had no pressure gauge to help you estimate how much oxygen remained. The suit clock would give you a running time to empty and a low pressure warning. Happy didn't like the design, but some efficiency expert had noticed most workers looked at the pressure gauge as much as a hundred times a shift, so they had removed the "distraction".
Having this obsessive attachment to breathing Happy took the reserve bottle to the refill station and screwed the feed hose on. When he pushed the fill button it informed him the bottle was good and at full pressure. He racked that back in the suit and grabbed the large knurled ring that attached the armored hose from the other bottle to the regulator.
He couldn't turn it.
While he was old by vacuum worker standards he had both Life Extension Therapy and a gene modification that gave him strength per kilogram that approached what an adult chimpanzee possessed. The knurled ring was not supposed to be tightened or removed with a tool. He tried again with all his strength. It didn't budge. The fitting could not be cross threaded. It had special threads and a sleeve that kept it from tilting as you tightened it.
There were no flats or slots on the nut. When he looked really closely there two places on the knurled surface, opposite each other, where the sharp points of the knurling had been flattened. Not just worn rounded and not sharp from handling but with a little flat at the point from being gripped. Now, if he'd been trying to kill someone he's have wrapped the nut in a thin sheet of something grippy like a suit liner to protect the knurling.
Not only was somebody trying to kill him but they were amateurs to leave evidence, he thought with contempt. This sloppy a job would be discovered in the investigation after he couldn't switch bottles in the field and died. Then he reconsidered. If the killers had controlled the entire investigation and conclusions, why get fancy or worry about it? That scared him.
Happy took out his pad and took pix of the damaged knurls. Then he hung the suit on a service rack and rolled it down to maintenance. He wanted to see the technician's reaction. He introduced himself as the new construction boss, and shook the young fellow's hand since he offered it. He introduced himself but had a name tag that said Hoffman. That amused Happy, he decided not to risk insulting the fellow by asking if he knew the origins of the name.
"I have a problem with my suit I want you to address right now," Happy demanded.
"Yes sir. Let me set this job aside safely and I'll be with you in just a minute." He didn't seem guilty or upset. Happy watched him write on an actual paper sticky sheet where he was with the regulator rebuild job. He slid the sticky pad with the old parts in a zipper bag with a label marking them as old and the plastic bag of new parts that hadn't been opened, so he was good on procedure there. The whole tray with the job, once documented, was put in a rack. The kid seemed to know his stuff and how to minimize human error.
He got a service request form and turned back to Happy. "What can I do for you?"
"First hold off on the service sheet," Happy told him. That surprised the tech and he didn't like it. Happy could see he was C/O at religiously following routine. That was good in his job.
"Who is the department head here for criminal acts? I haven't met him yet."
"Director of Safety is Paul Liggett. I have to say sir, we don't have much in the way of criminal acts. I doubt Director Liggett has had opportunity to wear his cop hat much."
The fact the kid was trained to use Liggett's title even when speaking to a third party about him said loads about the culture of the colony to Happy.
"Check out the primary bottle coupling, and you'll see why I'm asking," Happy said.
The tech seemed puzzled, as well he might. The item was so simple and robust in design and operation one of lesser experience would be tempted to call it fool-proof. When he couldn't turn it the tech was outraged. He got a grippy rubber pad such as they sold to open stubborn jars of jam and tried again. The tech just glared at him and didn't say anything. He got in a tool box with his name on it and got a pair of binocular magnifiers. Examining the knurling he said nothing until he was certain. Happy wondered if he'd have thought to look at that so quickly without the hints he had beforehand.
Hoffman flipped the lenses back over his head and said, "This is sabotage. I can't call it anything but attempted murder. I see why you want Safety called in."
"Would you take documentary photos, and then call Mr. Liggett and inform him please? I'm going to call the site foreman and inform him I won't be visiting the site today."
"If you would stay just a moment, there's something else we should check, and I'd much prefer you see me do it," Hoffman said.
"Alright, I can wait a minute," Happy agreed.
The tech documented the damage and used the same grippy pad to avoid adding to the damage on the knurling. He tried loosening it with a big pair of adjustable pliers, but couldn't hold the bottle from turning. Once he had a long strap wrench around the bottle itself he could press the handles together and apply enough force. The fitting made a long high pitched squeak when it let loose. The sort that gave you shivers up your back even if nobody tried to kill you.
"Well crap, I have to scrap this coupling and the valve assembly on the bottle too. Both sides are treated with dry lube for vacuum and they were never designed to be torqued this tight. They may be stretched or cracked. But what I want to check is the fill," Hoffman said.
> He screwed a coupling on the bottle with an old fashioned dial pressure gauge like they all had before they were "improved" and opened the valve. The gauge had a pointer painted on the glass for a full charge. The needle only went to three quarters of that.
"Well, I thought they weren't that competent to leave marks on the coupling," Happy said, "but they had the wits to imagine what I would do out on the job site and time it so I'd be alone when I ran out of air."
"Oxygen," the tech corrected automatically, "but I'm not sure what you mean. Why did you intend to be alone? That's generally discouraged outside pressure."
"I was out here, to Mars, before. Second expedition," Happy explained. "But I never got down to the surface. It doesn't even take any imagination to know I wanted to get down here this time. I mentioned it to a number of people as a primary reason for taking the job. I intended to visit the work site, have the site foreman walk me around for a quick show and tell, and take one of the rovers far enough out past the construction to savor being on the surface without any human works around me. I didn't tell anybody that detail, but it wouldn't take much knowledge of human nature to figure out that's what I would do. I didn't intend to ask somebody to stop working to come babysit me. Bad enough to cop the use of the rover."
"Nobody says cop for steal anymore," Hoffman said, "That's so 2050. . . but I take your meaning because I watch old movies, even flat ones. They do discourage joy riding, but you have a big enough job title nobody would say anything unless it got to be a habit."
"Go ahead and report it to Liggett," Happy said. "I'm going to go make my call and see to some other things today instead of the job site." Hoffman just nodded agreement.
Chapter 26
Happy went back to his quarters. The gift pistol from the kids was better than the earlier models in a very important way, it was much slimmer. If somebody was trying to kill him it was time to arm up. He removed it from the hiding place inside his computer and stuck the thin holster against his skin on the left tucked in his pants. The inner surface had little micro-grippy shapes like a lizards foot. He had gloves and footies of the same material that would let him climb a wall at a standard G and go across the ceiling here or on the moon.
A Sudden Departure (April Book 9) Page 30
