Been There, Done That

by Mackey Chandler

  “You feel slighted,” Joel acknowledged, “but I am sure nothing I could have told you would have saved this negotiation. I am dismayed they have the resources to ferret out the Brazilian connection, but I’m not sure I believe them otherwise. This new claim on minor bodies doesn’t seem sufficient reason to have built this ship. Neither do the launch dates and radio transmissions make any sense. Could there be another ship we missed entirely? Yet there doesn’t seem to have been time or materials to account for building two vessels.”

  “You’ve been immersed in politics too long,” Pierre told his old friend bluntly. “I’m not sure these children know how to bluff. I suspect they would disdain doing so as basically dishonest for anything short of simple survival. They never tied the ship to their new claims. You jumped to that supposition yourself. They didn’t really volunteer what the purpose of the ship was, just that we were mistaken in some unspecified particular I said about it. In truth they never even admitted having a new ship, even though it has named itself with traffic control and announced who was Master. But it named no destination, so even connecting it to visiting the planetoids is again, supposition.”

  “Do you think otherwise?” Joel demanded.

  “No, but I’m pointing out even the most basic things we think we know are all theory. We are still missing something basic, and any of the things we think we know could prove wrong once we have that missing key fact,” Pierre said.

  “If they are such politically unsophisticated children how did they manage to say nothing?” Joel demanded. “As I understand it, there is no way around needing a significant velocity to use Weir’s drive, and no other to attain those speeds given our current engineering without Helium 3.”

  “I agree,” Pierre said, again, “as we understand it.” Joel was unhappy. He was unhappy. On the plus side, at least Joel hadn’t asked what they got in return for their very extravagant gift of cuff links.

  * * *

  “So, do we declare now, or wait until another supply cycle and flight to get ahead a little on critical supplies?” Project Director Schober asked.

  Liggett, his safety director, wondered if it was a genuine question or if Albert had already decided, and was just testing his commitment and loyalty.

  “There will never be a perfect time to secede,” Liggett said. That would test solidly positive for truthfulness if Schober was doing computer veracity analysis on him. “Each resupply mission tends to leave a few more people than they take back. We discourage them from sending glorified tourists and researchers who add very little to our real stability and independence. I’m quite certain we can’t fit everybody we don’t want back on just one flight even now.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing,” Schober said, and gave a wry smile.

  “I’m not sure I see why,” Liggett admitted. “You may be thinking so far ahead of me that you’ll just have to tell me.” And it never hurt to butter up your boss…

  “If we sent everybody back who we want to be rid of, they could just cut us off. If they still have people here they are pretty much committed to another supply mission. That gives our supporters more time to either try to gain control of the Sandman from the Mars Corporation or build a vessel themselves.”

  “It seems to me they would welcome a chance to unload such a specialized vessel for which they would have no further use,” Liggett said.

  “In a rational world yes, but there are politics involved. They may drag it out hoping to send a squad of soldiers on the next flight and put us against the wall.”

  “That… doesn’t sound like a good public relations move for a quasi-public corporation,” Liggett said, but he looked uncomfortable at that vision.

  “The space nuts would go crazy. Also Central and Home have set a prohibition against armed ships past L1, so at most we’d have to worry about a squad of riflemen,” Schober said. “We have both shuttles here, so unless they build another lander in a hurry they are going to have to use ours. Spaceships are delicate and I’m already having our fabricating shop create a pair of weapons sufficient to disable it on docking at Phobos.”

  “Missiles?” Liggett wondered.

  “Nothing so fancy, basically a couple crew serviced big bore shotguns. Don’t worry, you can have security train on them. You’ll test them actually. You aren’t being bypassed or a separate military being formed.”

  “Two are just for redundancy then?” Liggett asked. He didn’t express his relief that security would deploy them. That had been his first thought and concern when Albert mentioned they were already being made. He’d immediately worried why he hadn’t been consulted what to build.

  “Always, if it wasn’t a very mature technology I’d make three,” Schober said. “So, I think we will tell them not to send any new personnel this trip, and expect a full passenger load going back. Our donors and supporters are ready, best we move while they are enthused, and before any drop out from a long boring wait for action. I’m pretty sure some of them are vicarious revolutionaries.”

  “I’m ready,” Liggett said. “I’ll see to it my people are ready too.” Liggett couldn’t see a single thing he’d been asked that would have made any difference, so Schober had made up his mind already.

  * * *

  Vic and Eileen listened to the evening news summary after supper. They didn’t talk over it and possibly miss something. When it was over they discussed it as usual. Vic found he brought more knowledge of history to the discussion but Eileen was very insightful on the people factors.

  “It sounds like North America is getting things under much better control sooner than I expected,” Vic admitted. “They’ve done some very practical things like remove the restrictions on wood burning in rural areas and the crop reports everybody was ignoring anyway. They’re even acknowledging that the migration to the south isn’t temporary, and all those people are going to have to be integrated long term.”

  “I don’t understand how the Republic of Texas can demand they grant the autonomous areas independence,” Eileen said. “They can’t even send any significant military into our area, much less pretend they can reach up into Oregon and Washington.”

  “They can’t,” Vic agreed, “but they can stop North America from sending their own troops into the west coast.”

  “How can they do that?” Eileen asked, scrunching her brow up.

  “By making it clear they’ll rue not having them in Alabama and Tennessee if they send them here. Texas might gobble up the rest of Mississippi and east past Mobile, as well as extend Louisiana north to the thirty fifth parallel.”

  “Would you want to be a Texan?” Eileen asked.

  “I can think of worse things happening for us,” Vic said, “but don’t think it will come to that, not within my lifetime. I think things are going to stabilize for awhile, as long as they continue not to use aircraft against each other and as long as the winters don’t get any worse in the heartland. They are growing short season corn now in Ohio, and not much of anything in Minnesota, some rye and potatoes. There’s only one thing I’m a little nervous about because nobody has mentioned it at all.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nevada is near empty,” Vic reminded her, “and Arizona and New Mexico have lost a lot of their urban populations moved to Texas and Colorado, but what are the Mormons up to?”

  “Minding their own business?” Eileen guessed. “Shouldn’t somebody?”

  “Likely,” Vic agreed, “and they’re very good at minding their business.”

  * * *

  The partners in the Life Lottery, Sylvia, Diana, and Eric and his sister Lindsey, had winners. They all met at Sylvia’s place to see what they could find out about them on the Earth nets and discuss how to handle them for promotion. The couple who won was Italian and looked to be a great fit for boosting their game, if they wanted to cooperate. They were pretty easy to call and talk to via video conference. They agreed to let the initial call be recorded so that was encouraging. The
single fellow sent a short text message where to forward his lift ticket and declined a video call. They all read what posts they could find on him, and were a bit dismayed.

  “Go with the couple for PR,” Sylvia said. “I want us to distance ourselves from the single winner as far as possible.”

  They knew from public records and news reports their single winner was controversial. It was a big enough worry to ask Muños and Gunny what they should do. Muños spoke privately to Head of Security Jon and Gunny asked Chen to run an inquiry as a personal favor. The man was Argentine but a resident of Monaco. Jon had access to Interpol data bases. Interpol had a rap sheet on the fellow that ran pages long. It started at eighteen because juvenile records were sealed. He was definitely more criminal than simply controversial.

  Chen’s inquiries were even more troubling. He was praised by spies and mercenaries for all the wrong reasons. Some of the items on his list of convictions they refused to explain to Eric. If he wanted to go look the terms up later they couldn’t stop him.

  “How does a guy get caught this many times and they keep letting him go?” Lindsey asked indignantly.

  “Because – Earth,” Sylvia said, bluntly.

  “I guess dad brought us up here before I was aware of things like this. School and my friends were my world. We had trouble makers at school, but never anybody like this. I never watched the news programs because they droned on and on and it was boring,” Lindsey admitted.

  “The Pravos smiled a lot when you talked to them,” Eric said. “He looks just old enough, that he should make great before and after pix. Did you notice? He has those little lines in the corner of his eyes,” he said, drawing them with his finger on his own face.

  “Those are called crow’s feet,” Diana told him. “I had them before my treatment, so he should lose them too. People tend to smile when they have just won a lottery, but I got the impression they are just the smiling sort of people.”

  “Yes, they will make great ad copy,” Sylvia agreed. “We should show them a good time. They’ll be good word of mouth and local coverage when they return.”

  “What do we do with Mr. Sabato?” Diana asked. “I don’t even want to meet him after reading his profile.”

  “Tell Gunny to send one of his partners to handle the man and escort him around. Not Gunny himself, that’s still too close an association to us, but maybe that older fellow Mackay. Nobody is going to pull a fast one on him,” Sylvia said.

  “Perfect, I’ll tell them to frame it to the creep like he’s getting special VIP treatment, not arms length isolation,” Diana said.

  * * *

  “Wow, wow, wow… ” April exclaimed. That was with sufficient emotion for Jeff to look up and for Heather to lift a dramatic eyebrow.

  “I have to call my grandpa and see what he makes of this,” April decided.

  “Do I have to check my messages or are you going to tell us?” Jeff asked.

  “It’s from Chen. He’s so conservative. I’d have labeled this with a much higher urgency,” April said, then chewed on her lip and corrected herself. “But it isn’t going to affect us in the next couple hours,” she admitted, “maybe days.”

  “The Martians have declared themselves sovereign, announced they will be expelling about half the people already on Mars, and drastically curtailing who is welcome in the future,” April finally told them.

  “Like they were all that welcoming before,” Jeff scoffed. “You know we have plans for a fast Mars shuttle but the fact they don’t want tourists or even most of the researchers and scientists eager to go there means there’s no market for improved transportation. What they have is sufficient.”

  “What are they going to eat?” Heather asked. “We’d still miss Earth goods if we were cut off. We wouldn’t starve, but look how hard we worked to get there.”

  “Dropping their population to a hundred or a little bit more will ease that,” Jeff said. “They will have excess cubic under pressure they can convert to food production. But they really should have built their base closer to one of the poles for the water.”

  “It seems like Mars would be an excellent candidate to put a snowball in orbit and bring some down every time a shuttle dropped,” Heather said.

  “Or if they hadn’t just severed themselves from any Earth financial support a Martian bean-stalk would make all kinds of sense,” Jeff said. “It would be much easier than doing it on Earth, give the engineers practical experience toward doing it in stronger gravity, and be much safer too.”

  “I wouldn’t assume they won’t have any financial support from Earth,” April said, scowling while she considered it. “They may look insane to us, but none of this says why they seceded. I’m not sure I can believe they are so deranged that they will isolate themselves without any consideration of the practicality of it. I’ll make a prediction. They are just changing who they accept support from, and nobody off Earth would give a flying fig about anything they do, so it will be some other Earth faction who wants to take up supporting them.”

  “Mars has always been a money sink,” Jeff reminded her. “What could they offer to anybody to support them? I think we’re talking a couple billion EuroMarks a year just for a minimum support mission every six months. That would be a serious investment even in real money.”

  “Well, I suppose they could offer the same thing Heather here has,” April said. “Huge tracts of land for very little money compared to even the worst desert on Earth. The surface gravity is roughly twice that of the Moon. Some people never do adjust to lunar gravity. Presumably fewer would have medical troubles with the Martian gravity.

  “If anybody has discovered an ore body worth exploiting they have kept it secret. They don’t even have enough readily collectible volatiles to supply mass for their own shuttles. The big negative is the long flight time from Earth and the attendant supply difficulties. Their cost to place a kilogram of freight on the Martian surface is about five times the cost of the Moon, even believing the Mars Corp’s numbers.”

  “If they have no physical product to sell what can they offer in the way of a service? I mean, since they reject the obvious tourism,” Heather said.

  “Anything they could offer like banking or gambling or the creepier sorts of low life entertainment could be done cheaper closer to Earth and would be as soon as anybody saw them making any serious money at it,” Jeff said.

  They all sat and frowned at the mystery in silence a few minutes.

  “April has tried to teach me about people,” Jeff said, awkwardly.

  “What about me?” Heather protested.

  “You’ve taught me more by example,” Jeff said. “Some of the things I’ve seen you deal with when you hold court… Well, I wouldn’t believe some of them if you presented them as fiction. But the point I was going to make is that for anything to be as inexplicable as what the Martians are doing, I just can’t imagine it is simple business driving it. I think it has to be either religion or politics.”

  “You may have something there,” April admitted, “and sometimes they are real tough to tell apart.”

  * * *

  On the Moon April still had her pad set to get HomeNet broadcast bulletins forwarded. She heard the priority chime, read the message and said, “Nope, not going to get sucked into that today,” out loud. She hard erased the message and set her phone to take alerts off the local net only.

  At Home, Sylvia and Lindsey were working on a glass panel together. They had hearing protection, as well as smocks and gloves. Eye protection was both safety glasses and a full face shield. Besides the noise of a vacuum, with hoses sucking right where they touched tool to work, to collect the glass they ground away, they had a padded curtain drawn around the studio work area that muffled sound. It was their habit to leave their phones outside where they were less likely to be damaged, and of course the safety glasses precluded spex. They were unusually isolated for what was considered ‘normal’ now.

  Diana pulled back the heavy c
urtain and yelled loud enough to get their attention. Sylvia pulled a glove off, lifted a muff, and yanked an earplug out.

  “Take a break. Something’s come up you need to deal with,” Diana insisted.

  Diana was given to drama, but not false alarms. Lindsey was watching to see what Sylvia would do, and started removing everything too, when she saw it was going to be a full work stop. She’d learned the way Sylvia removed her smock turning it inside out with the gloves inside. They’d go in the vacuum tumbler without shedding all over. Her helmet and face shield got rapped on the side of the glass panel to dislodge any pieces.

  Despite all that they would both still go shower and change clothing or there would invariably be a tiny grit secreted somewhere that would start itching.

  Lindsey went ahead to shower and Sylvia stopped, bandana still tied around her hair to consult with Diana. Rather than say anything, Lindsey might still hear Diana just showed her the General Bulletin message on her pad.

  “Oh bullshit, she knows better than that. Have you called Jon?” Sylvia asked.

  “I thought you should. It’s your house after all. If I were you I’d talk to Lindsey before you call Jon too. She may have some advice and she should know what’s happening anyway,” Diana insisted. “I’ll let you tell her.”

  Sylvia hesitated a moment. “OK, but I’m still going to take a quick shower and make myself presentable. This may drag on and require we meet with Jon.”

  Lindsey went in her room right after showering so Sylvia ducked in to use it quickly.

  “What’s going on?” Lindsey asked Diana, when she came out.