All in Good Time

by Mackey Chandler

  When he woke he had to use the toilet and had lost all feeling for how much time had passed. The lighting was constant, and he decided enough time had passed to demonstrate it was never dimmed. The slot opened and delivered what was a breakfast visually, confirming his theory about the light and the passage of time. Breakfast was oatmeal in the center pocket of the tray, two slices of thick toast with canary yellow ‘butter’, and a strange fruit bar of chopped citrus and raisins, unlike anything he’d ever had. It wasn’t as awful as supper.

  * * *

  Tommy was installed in the house and invited to eat anything they had on hand. Vic seemed to assume he could cook, and Eileen hadn’t seen any hesitation or dismay like he might not be able to handle that. Vic encouraged him to stay inside and not venture out as that exposed him much more to ambush or raiders. He suggested burning a small fire in the stove even if it wasn’t that cool to let people know the house was occupied.

  Eileen wasn’t sure if Tommy was older or younger than her. He looked about seventeen but she didn’t want to ask for fear she’d be thought critical. She had to admit he was likely a good catch for Pearl compared to just about every young buck she’d seen around here. He was nothing to compare to Vic however. When she thought of Tommy she thought – boy – and when she thought of Vic she thought – man. Vic left the gun safe open for him and again didn’t question his ability. She hoped he was right.

  “What are we paying Tommy?” Eileen asked.

  “A kilogram of salt,” Vic said.

  Eileen just nodded. She couldn’t figure out if that was cheap or dear.

  Vic gave her his lighter rifle to carry setting up a target and using some precious ammunition to let her get the feel of the weapon. He had her fire three rounds at the target about fifteen meters away. Satisfied, he moved it half again as far away and encouraged her to shoot three rounds as fast as she felt confident she was back on target.

  The second three were closer together than the first three. He was pleased.

  They started for the Festival grounds at Mast’s house well before sunrise. Vic explained at the start that he would walk in the middle of the road most of the time. She was encouraged to stay four or five meters behind. If the one side of the road was impossible to climb up or down he’d walk the opposite edge.

  “Isn’t the guy out front more at risk?” Eileen asked. “Shouldn’t I take the lead or at least switch off with you?”

  “The guy out front, the point man, is at more risk, but he has to know what to look for and anticipate ambushes. A scuff mark on the shoulder of the road or something up in the brush that just isn’t quite right. If you are on point and miss it we may walk deeper into the jaws of an ambush before I will see it trailing you.”

  “When can I learn this stuff so I’m qualified to lead?” Eileen asked.

  Vic thought about it a minute.

  “I should have been giving you lessons when we had Arnold with us last time. My error, but now is not the time to fix it,” Vic said.

  “OK, we’ll leave it for another time,” Eileen agreed.

  Vic frowned in thought. “If something should happen to me this might help you. You should carry it, not me,” he decided. He gave her a paper map of the county in a zip-seal bag. “I have the thing committed to memory so well I think I could draw all the important parts by hand if I needed to.”

  Everything went fine until mid-morning. There was a pretty steep bank on their right where the road made a cut across a slope. On the left, there was a guard rail and a slope falling away with vegetation, not like the bare rocky dirt of the road cut.

  Vic stopped abruptly, turned and came back to her and spoke low. “Over the guard rail and down the slope on your butt. I’m right behind. Don’t leave a footprint near the edge or break a bunch of weeds. We want to get far enough into the trees to lie down and hide.”

  Eileen aimed for a spot where there was no sand drifted in from the shoulder. There were high weeds but she went around them to the left and looked back to make sure they weren’t pushed over before sitting down and starting a controlled slide.

  Vic motioned her on a couple of times, when she thought to stop, then turned and went back the way they’d come away, parallel to the road. He squatted behind a tree leaned back and pulled his hood up, his rifle upright between his feet. When he pointed to another tree she copied him and got a nod of approval.

  They sat silent for a long time and when she looked at Vic he was using a tiny mirror with a mesh over it to look over his shoulder. She could see his binocular strap around his neck, but they were hanging inside his jacket. It seemed a very long time until Eileen finally heard a noise from above. There was a muted cough and then a few snatches of speech that were too low to understand.

  Maybe ten minutes later Vic looked over and made an emphatic gesture three times for her to stay put. He stood and started slowly going back the way they’d come and at an angle upslope. She didn’t like being left. It was another half hour before there was a muffled shot.

  The shot was so distant Eileen had a hard time believing it involved Vic either as shooter or target. He had been moving slow and cautious when he left and the shot was really distant. If he’d engaged whoever passed she suspected there would have been a flurry of shots. He’d been so emphatic about her staying Eileen resolved to obey his instructions. She had no idea if a really good woodsman could follow Vic’s back trail. She couldn’t see any marks on the ground or vegetation even knowing where he started and the approximate path he followed. Maybe somebody else could. Just in case, she decided to obey him to the extent of staying in the area, but moving carefully to another position where she could see the spot she was sitting right now, and ambush them if a stranger came back along Vic’s path.

  Just to bait the spot and hope somebody would investigate it closer if they did come along she took a single glove from her spare pair and dropped it carelessly where she’d sat. It fell in a crumpled attitude that pleased her. It obviously wasn’t carefully laid there. Eileen retraced the path along which she got to that spot so as not to make a double trail, then when she was about ten meters away made a loop slightly uphill, stopped to empty her bladder, and came back until she found a spot with good cover from which she could see the glove. It was about as far away as the target Vic had her shoot at so that gave her confidence. She found a good comfortable place to sit where she wouldn’t need to keep moving and waited.

  Vic came back from slightly downhill, not along the route he’d left her. It was instructive just watching him approach. He moved along a zigzag route without making a sound, stopped frequently and just stood still, checking behind him. Once he stopped and squatted, almost out of her sight, taking a bit longer than the standing stops. When Vic came to where she’d sat he didn’t walk directly to it. He made a half circle around it scanning the woods all around before he approached. While doing that he froze, eyes locked with hers, and she lifted a bare hand in greetings before he relaxed. She was in shadow and might be hard to identify. Vic went straight to her glove then and brought it to her.

  “You seem to have lost your glove m’lady.”

  “Oh, how careless of me, thank you.”

  “Was that meant as bait?” Vic asked directly.

  “Yes, if somebody was able to follow your trail back,” Eileen admitted. “Do you approve of that tactic?”

  “It would work for most people,” Vic said, nodding. “If somebody saw it that who had a lot of experience fighting irregular forces, guerrillas, they wouldn’t go near it. Not only could you be sitting watching from a firing position but you might have an explosive device set there. Unless they had a larger force a pro would retreat and take a long path around.”

  “What a marvelous idea. If we have a chance lets acquire some of those.”

  “Do you really want to learn the whole nine yards?” Vic asked. “There’s a lot to learn to handle explosives and deploy them effectively while not blowing yourself up. It’s one of those
things you probably won’t need to know off in space.”

  “Want to bet? Spacers never blow crap up?” Eileen asked.

  Vic looked like he actually thought about it a moment. “You got me there. I guess we might as well teach you to handle the little stuff before you advance to blowing up stuff like Santa Barbara County.”

  “I was worried after I heard that shot. Do you have any idea who was shooting and what they were shooting at?” Eileen asked.

  Vic nodded and looked grim. “I went back around the curve of the mountain until it started to turn into the next cleft cut down the mountain. I only heard them make noise once again. They were moving along pretty fast. So I climbed back near the road and waited. They did come into sight eventually across the arroyo where the road came back out on the next shoulder of the mountain. There were five of them, all men, and wearing a red brassard tied on their arm. I braced my rifle against a tree to steady it and got a good look at them with the magnification cranked up to 24x.

  “One of them seemed to be injured. Nothing that showed, but the guard rail cut my view off almost to his hip. He was limping, then fell, and they all stood around him and talked. I didn’t see who shot but he must not have been able to go on and they finished him off. I’m pretty sure because several leaned over to take items and added them to their gear.

  “How awful. They couldn’t carry him?”

  “I have no idea. They seemed intent on keeping up a hard pace. I’m thinking they had a run-in with another group. The brassards indicate they had a need to identify friend or foe.” He seemed reluctant to say more.

  “So, you think there might be people in pursuit of them?” Eileen suggested.

  “They may be raiders and afraid whoever they tangled with will organize a pursuit,” Vic said. “Raiders aren’t thick enough on the land to be likely to run into each other.”

  “Do you want to try to go on to Mast’s or head back home?” Eileen asked.

  “Get the map out and I’ll show you where we are,” Vic offered. When she unfolded it, Vic stared at it a little frowning.

  “This wider valley running up the side of the mountain was the third one back. This next narrower one is where I looked across and saw them shooting. That means we are here,” he said pointing with his finger.

  “Then we’re past half-way,” Eileen said.

  “Yeah, we lost maybe an hour and a half. If we can push a little we can still get there before full dark. Do you feel up to it?” Vic asked her.

  “I’d like to try if you aren’t worried about running into a group chasing them.”

  “If there is one, I suspect it will be a posse and not hostile to the likes of us,” Vic said.

  “Let’s get moving then,” Eileen said.

  “You lead now,” Vic said. “I want you to set the pace.”

  “Alright,” Eileen said, determined to make him regret that.

  * * *

  “The problem is, not any one particular item of supply,” Gabor Bodner, Director of Maintenance, said to Directors Schober and Liggett. “It is simply that things are wearing out. We can make smaller components in a fabber if we have the feedstock. If a door switch goes bad on a rover it’s trivial to have one made by the next morning shift. Until we run out of copper feed paste. If we have a drive gear in the power train go out that is a significant drain on our steel feedstock to duplicate. Examine the graph in my report, please. The demand curve of fabbing feed stock crosses the supply line and becomes critical when you get out about three supply cycles from now. We don’t have the machinery needed to recycle the various metals back into feedstock. We’ll get the more critical items in the next shipment on the Sandman but the distance between Earth and Mars is going to space out our supply cycle periods longer, making the trend worse.”

  “What was the original plan for dealing with larger systems wearing out and needing extreme service?” Director of Security Liggett asked.

  “There was no projection past three years,” Bodner admitted. “The detailing of a much longer and more expensive project at the onset might have made it politically impossible. The presumption at the time was the economy would grow robustly. The maintenance and any expansion expense would then become a smaller fraction of the economy compared to the initial outlay. We’d have better, more efficient designs of rovers and suits and everything we use gradually replace the earlier models, but the development never happened. They also intended to build another vessel, not to replace the Sandman but to at least double capacity.

  “The water mining machinery, in particular, will limit us from processing more soil to adapt to gardening. That means we will continue to require supply from Earth that was to have ended as our needs were met locally. The removal of chlorates from Martian soils requires several wet cycles and there is never a complete recovery of the water. The salts are removed as brines, not dried. The processors are not designed to be cleaned out that way. Eventually, the water gathered will not be able to meet our needs for drinking, bathing and food processing. We have losses in air leakage and wastes too.”

  “What are our choices?” Director Schober asked.

  “You need to raise greater support for supplies and modernization, or start reducing the population well before we reach a critical stage where we can’t support them,” Bodner insisted. “Long term, we must have another supply ship to even maintain our current occupied cubic and activities much less expand.”

  “Thank you,” Schober said. “We take this seriously and will start formulating a plan to deal with it right now.”

  Bodner took that for his dismissal, nodded his thanks and left.

  Ligget calmed his breathing and weighed his words carefully. He was very aware of how transparent his words were to veracity software. It revealed not just black and white belief but all the shades of doubt and unspoken reservations.

  “What are your orders, sir?”

  “He’s right,” Schober said. “Numbers don’t lie. We need to start on what we can do, which is right now is to reduce our population. Start making a list of people non-essential to the ship research and other activities we’ve maintained for appearance’s sake. We’ll send back as many as the Sandman can take to Earth. This isn’t a voluntary action; make a list based on our needs, not personal preferences.”

  “I’ll fine-tune it over a couple of days and get back to you,” Liggett promised.

  “Nobody with knowledge of the true nature of the alien ship of course,” Schober added. “You might as well start making a list of people to expel on the next ship after too. We have to be careful of those who aren’t insiders but have been exposed to enough information to connect the dots and puzzle it out. When we have reduced the support staff and removed everyone safe to send back then we will have to plan to remove the critical life support here and move everything needful to the ship site and abandon this base. The last rovers will have to make a one-way trip so there is no transport left to follow us.”

  Liggett’s stomach roiled. He hoped the biometrics were not obvious. The alien ship site wasn’t big enough to support much of a population at all. What Schober was saying was those left behind here would simply be sacrificed with life support and transport removed.

  “That’s too sensitive to ask logistics to draw up a moving plan,” Liggett said. “I’ll structure the question as an expansion of the ship site.”

  “That’ll work fine,” Schober said. If he were going to challenge Liggett he’d have done so right now. It appeared Schober thought he had his wholehearted support or was just squeamish and would be obedient despite personal qualms out of simple fear. Leggett just nodded and let himself out. He did have a couple of days now to do some planning. He’d have a list to go back on the Sandman, but there were other much more difficult plans to make too.

  Chapter 5

  Irwin thought it had been two days. He had another meal of mystery meat mechanically cut in bite-sized squares, a slice of white bread, a mix of steamed vegetables that see
med to be mostly potatoes and a serving of an Earth delicacy he’d completely forgotten about – fruit cocktail. He might have missed a meal if he was sleeping and they wouldn’t wake you, or if he was wrong in assuming they served three meals a day. Breakfast had been an exact repeat and he was sitting thinking about his missed meetings in Brussels and wondering if the Europeans knew he was a prisoner or if that was censored to them? He wondered if the USNA techs were having fun with his electronics. When they self wiped they still left files of encrypted nonsense so they might be spending valuable man-hours trying to crack what would be senseless gibberish anyway.

  A tone sounded and the screen lit back up with an earnest young man looking at him.

  “Mr. Hall? My name is Frederick Brooks and I’m your court-appointed attorney.”

  “How odd, since I didn’t ask a court to appoint an attorney for me,” Irwin said. “How is that possible when I haven’t stood before any court to be told the charges against me? I don’t even know which court is claiming jurisdiction over me, a foreign national, or who is accusing me of exactly what crimes.”

  “It is the USNA District Court for Southern Florida,” Brooks said, “and the charges are rather complex but I was told you were given summaries with a copy of your arrest warrant.”

  “The officer who took my personal property and street clothes took my paperwork too.”

  “You should have objected to that,” Brooks said.

  Irwin looked disgusted. “You really are a naïve little twerp if you think anybody is going to stop to listen to you for a second when they are throwing you in the slammer. Have you ever been arrested and processed? You don’t look old enough to buy a drink much less be arrested for anything. How am I supposed to have any attorney confidentiality speaking to you over a link my jailers own? This whole thing is a farce.”