Been There, Done That (April Book 10)

by Mackey Chandler

  “You are not authorized for MarsNet connections,” the fellow said, and was not at all friendly about it.

  “I’m new here,” Adams said, heart thumping in his chest. “If I can’t connect to MarsNet how do I download the latest movie?”

  The fellow softened a little and he eyes tracked something on his own screen. “Oh, new just last night,” he agreed. “Turn on your room com and there will be an ID in the bottom right corner. Set your own password and it will give you local wireless access through your room com. You can’t download direct. Everything you can access from MarsNet is loaded nightly to the local net storage. Clicking your ID will bring up a menu, the movie, Earth news and a few other things are always there.” He seemed uninterested now and disconnected.

  Adam did as directed, because if he didn’t it would look bad. But his heart was sinking. He might still get instructions in the movie, but his software reported back by triggering the download of a certain message file any time he requested the movie download, and he no longer could do that. He was cut off and had no idea how he could report.

  If he were agent 103 he might have figured out how, but he was picked by the Europeans for the very same qualities the Martians had found attractive, loyalty and stability, not unregulated brilliance.

  Adam sighed. This was so frustrating. He found the whole basis for the Martians’ secrecy constructed on a flawed base of assumptions. They were being as panicky as they assumed everybody else would be at their discovery, and he had no way to report the colossal mess. At least the work would be interesting.

  Chapter 13

  “We didn’t charge enough,” Diana told them. “I should have set the ticket price at $10k AUS, instead of $5k. We are way over subscribed. I didn’t think there was that much extra cash floating around looking to gamble on life extension therapy.”

  “You didn’t publish a cap. I’ll get the tickets printed even if I have to pay to build a second machine out of my own pocket,” Eric promised. “I think maybe we should offer physical tickets for the space market only, and go to block chain for digital tickets. Otherwise I can see me getting swamped by rising demand.”

  “It has three weeks to run and the curve isn’t flattening out,” Sylvia said. “I’m an old chart reader from way back, and I’m going to say you aren’t going to see a big drop off until the last week. We’re going to earn back Dr. Ames fees and twice as much easily.”

  “I’ve got a couple suggestions,” Eric said.

  “Have you gotten shy all of a sudden?” Diana asked. “Speak.”

  Eric lifted one finger. “Don’t start a new game for a couple weeks.” He lifted a second finger. “Don’t jack the price up, word will get around and people will think you are greedy,” He added a third and final finger. “If the people who win aren’t from someplace where it is illegal, offer them double the cost of their ticket back to take pix of them and follow their treatment for advertising.” He finished with a terminating little flourish of his hand. “The delay to the next game is to give that advertising time to work a little.”

  “Maybe we can get Jelly to give us better terms, because this has to suck in some business for him. Clients he wouldn’t get without the lotto. Shucks, what we are doing is advertising for him even without showing off a winner,” Sylvia said.

  “Maybe, I hit that angle up pretty hard negotiating with him before we ever started sales,” Diana admitted.

  “Wait until he can see some results and go back and renegotiate,” Eric said.

  “What did you say about not being greedy?” Lindsey counseled.

  “She has a point. We may be getting ahead of ourselves,” Diana said. “Let’s see what a second game does before we start trying to refine it. We may saturate the market and have to find a new prize.”

  “If we do, like I said, I’ve got a Solar that says we go four games before it starts to slow down,” Eric said, holding the coin up.

  “Honey,” Diana said, “you’re a good kid and all, but I’m not going stupid in my old age. I’m not going to bet a bit with you.”

  “That’s just the nicest thing anybody has ever said about me,” Eric said, and looked like he was fighting not to tear up.

  * * *

  Paul sent a call request at the second level to his boss head of CoPO, Markus. He hardly ever made a video call instead of a text message so Markus took it.

  “On that Mars thing… we get a ping back when our agents look at the transmission in which we hide their messages. It’s embedded in the software and we were very careful to make sure nobody on Mars has the level of sophistication to ferret it out. The last several days 71 simply hasn’t called up the items he’s supposed to track to get his messages.”

  “Is that the Eye of Enki?” Markus asked.

  “No, this is the mundane watcher on the Eye. Agent 103 is still checking. He didn’t know his watcher of course. We simply haven’t tasked the lesser agent with doing anything that should lead to any sort of problem, much less discovery.”

  “Things happen,” Markus reminded him. “We’ve had agents fail to report because they did something stupid like step in front of a bus or fall over their own feet going down stairs.”

  “I’ll mark him as probably dead, and watch the Mars reports for any indication he had an accident,” Paul agreed.

  “And mark him as unreliable without secondary verification if he does reappear. He may have been compromised,” Markus decided. “Would he have done something of his own initiative? If he had opportunity would he aggressively pursue some source like you’d expect an Eye to do?”

  “He isn’t the personality type,” Paul said. “He’s above average intelligence, but not so much like 103 that you’d expect him to do something clever given the opportunity. I’d imagine it would have to be something literally falling in his lap, so what are the odds of that happening?”

  “You have some assets working under false assumptions,” Markus said. “If you want to risk one of them see what they can find out about him.”

  “I’ll let it go a week and try that,” Paul said. “I don’t like mysteries.”

  * * *

  “We left both the French mills on Ceres,” Delores reported. “The terrain just seemed more suitable to the ability of artificial stupids not to get in trouble. Also we had two very different types of soil on which to try each.”

  “The one spot checked pretty rich in silver. About three times as much as anywhere we’ve found on the Moon,” Kurt said. The other site is similar to regolith but more nickel and less iron. That’s just spot checking with a laser. They are both set to range over a wider area than we sampled and record the yield each place they stop.”

  “I didn’t ask,” Heather said. “What do they do when they are full up? Just shut down and wait to be serviced?”

  “We didn’t try to set them up to save everything like here. They just save the more valuable metals. If they get full, they stop to fuse them in pellets, dump them in a cache that we can recover and then move on,” Jeff said. “We’ll worry about saving everything we can when we have a human presence there.”

  “How is the cache marked?” April wondered.

  “When it dumps the pellets out, it goes in a circle around them a couple times. All we have to do is follow the track, and when it makes a circle, it will be visible. And I’m working on making the walking bot carrier fold up smaller so you can fit them in the ship hold easier,” Jeff said.

  “Why not strap them on the outside instead of carrying them in the hold?” April asked. “It’s not like they’re delicate.”

  “Why not?” Jeff agreed. “As long as we can balance them out on the ship, and remove them in sets to stay that way.”

  Kurt and Delores looked at each other, and some sort of signal must have passed between them about who would speak. Kurt leaned back and folded his hands in his lap. Alice though quiet as usual seemed to relax too.

  “I’m glad we had this shake-down cruise,” Delores said, �
�and we’re looking forward to making some money soon here at home. In this system I mean. But the ship’s running as sweet as can be, and we’re ready to see another star.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jeff said. “We have no intention of holding you up. We’ve been to Centauri twice, but we didn’t know how to navigate with short jumps back then. We didn’t really see much of anything. We sure didn’t get close to any planets. Would you be content with that for a first run?”

  “That seems reasonable for our first target,” Delores agreed. “After all, you know the drive has taken you there safely twice. If I owned the ship, I’d want to go back there for a sure thing, first round too.”

  Delores being reasonable was a gift. Jeff didn’t spoil it with some snarky remark. April had been teaching him social skills. He was glad not to have to argue because not only did the three of them want to proceed with caution, Dave who built the ship, and had an interest in it, also didn’t want to take any unnecessary risks. Jeff could get high handed and just order them, but that wasn’t an effective way to manage smart motivated people.

  “You have them making another claim broadcasting radio, don’t you?” Heather asked Jeff.

  “Yes. It’s ready and I can run it out if any of the original units fail.”

  “Send it with the Hringhorni,” Heather decided. “Commission another for back up purposes. If they do find anything worth claiming at Proxima Centauri they should have a way to mark it.” Heather looked at Deloris and switched voices clearly as she was wont to do.

  “We shall make it policy that My pilot in command, whether sworn or hired, shall always have a limited commission to act as my Hand and Voice to make territorial claims. Central commanders shall be given a token of authority which will pass with command.”

  Deloris just nodded, freaked out a little. She wasn’t used to seeing the visible transformation and change of voice Heather underwent speaking as Sovereign.

  * * *

  Paul reported in to Markus. “The fellow who thinks he is working for the Turks asked in the cafeteria what happened to his buddy, Adam, who he used to eat with sometimes. He was told he was transferred. Nobody volunteered any details, and he said it might be worth his life to push for any more.”

  “Do you think he was turned?” Markus asked.

  “Adam? No, I think if he’d been turned he’d have keep right on accessing our messages. I think it’s probably more complicated than that. He may have gotten assigned to whatever secret resource sucking activity we are trying to discover. If so, they are doing a much better job of isolating the people assigned to it, than covering its existence up as a general thing.”

  “That wider secret by its nature has to reach back here to Earth. Local control is much easier. I can see that actually. I think your secondary source is right. If they control it that tightly, he better not show too much interest,” Markus said.

  * * *

  There was still lots of snow higher up in the mountains. You could see it on a clear day. Down here, there was snow on the north side of the hill across from them, and patches in ravines and behind big rocks, but there were a lot of bare spots too, and the streams were high. The roads were even less passable muddy than snow covered. There was dirt turned over in the garden and black garbage bags laid on the soil weighed down with rocks to help it warm up.

  There were trays and egg cartons in the kitchen with plants sprouted, which needed to be moved outside soon. There were a lot of things they wanted to grow they didn’t have seed to plant. A lot of the locals would sell their harvest of heirlooms as seed this fall. Some seed would be brought in from the east, but it would be dear. They had tomatoes and squash, but needed seed corn and onions. This summer they would gather and hunt as much as possible and save their harvest. Canning supplies were precious and they planned to explore abandoned properties and trash dumps for old jars from even store made products.

  Jonathan and his son-in-law Barney were struggling to repair a pair of boots with improvised soles, and Jenny and Cindy were sewing a seam on Barney’s pants and trying to re-discover how to darn a sock with yarn unraveled from one too far gone to save.

  Eileen had just gone to the outhouse. It was chill enough this early in the morning she still wore her heavy jacket. When the door latch was heard working nobody looked up, expecting her return, until the heavy door was thrown full open with a kick and crashed against the wall. The fellow who stepped in scanned the room with an experienced glance, tracking with both his eyes and a shotgun held low in a ready grip. Everybody froze.

  The invader was terribly skinny with pants that would have fallen off if not gathered tight at the waist by a belt. The long tongue of extra belt hanging out of the buckle with extra holes cut every couple inches told a story of slow starvation.

  The man behind him was just as skinny, with the same rough uncombed hair and beard. He hung back a bit out of the way, with a big revolver in both hands. He had on a blue work shirt with yellow embroidery above the pocket that said: Dave’s Discount Tires.

  “Go get the girl we saw heading for the outhouse and bring her back,” the fellow with the shotgun said, without looking back at his partner.

  “Gotcha,” he said with economy.

  The tire man approached the outhouse walking quietly. He’d learned to do that pretty quickly after the Day. He was smiling, looking forward to scaring the girl silly. She looked pretty cute from the tree line, from where they had observed the house since before sun rise. She’d be a treat.

  He tucked his pistol flat against his belly so he wouldn’t hit it with the door and leaned forward, stretching a little to reach the door handle. When he yanked it open he stood back straight quickly to avoid the door. He never had time to fully register what he was seeing or stop smiling before the muzzle of the big pistol Eileen was holding out flared with fire and the impact of the bullet on his chest made his standing motion carry through and put him flat on his back. He didn’t so much as twitch once down, laying legs splayed straight with the stupid grin still on his face.

  “Oh shit, can’t you do anything right, Daryl?” the guy in the kitchen said out loud at the sound of the shot from the outhouse. He was disciplined by hard experience though. He didn’t turn or stop watching his prisoners for an instant. He simply assumed wrongly that it was Daryl who had fired.

  Eileen walked across the back porch hard, stomping with her heels a little like a big man who had no reason to tread softly. She didn’t even have to hurry her aim, because the gunman inside never turned his head. She took careful aim from six feet away like he was a paper target, and shot him right between the shoulder blades straight through the spine.

  “How did you get the best of him? How did you get his gun?” Her grandfather Jonathan asked in a rattled voice, his face contorted in shock. It was more a statement of his own confusion than a serious question.

  “Calmly now, give me the gun,” her father, Barney said, holding his hand out to Eileen and talking to her with a soft soothing voice like she was a little child or a crazy woman.

  “I’m just as calm as can be, and this is my gun,” Eileen said in a steady voice. “If you want another gun the dead guy out at the outhouse still has his, go take it. I claim the shotgun this fellow is lying on too,” she said, nodding at the sprawled corpse. She frowned… “You don’t seem to appreciate it at all that I just saved your butts, again.”

  “Of course we do, but as long as you’re living in my house I’ll decide who can keep a gun,” her father said. Her grandfather looked up sharply at that. He counted it his house. There would be words about that later too. Her dad took another small step closer to her, pulling his hand back like that made it OK. Everything in his behavior said he intended to grab her weapon away from her.

  “You are one step from joining the fellow on the floor,” Eileen informed him. She still had her finger on the trigger, and they knew she had the safety drill about trigger discipline down cold from when she was eleven years old. The muzzl
e was aimed at the floor between them, and if she had to actually lift it slightly to point the weapon it would be far too late to discuss anything. That was how they’d trained her, that you don’t point unless you’d already decided to shoot. They all looked at her in degrees of horror, realizing she meant it. Only her mother, Cindy looked entirely unsurprised.

  Eileen spoke before any of them could recover their wits. “I’ll save you the trouble of sorting it all out. I’ll remove myself from your house, whoever it belongs to. I won’t be your prisoner, your chattel, or play at being an infant when I’m not. Now drag that fellow off his gun and leave it for me to pick up. If he has any extra shells in his pockets I want them too,” she demanded. When her dad was far enough away with the body she squatted, took the shotgun in her left hand and backed up. She didn’t take her eyes off her family any more than the gunman had.

  “Where do you think you can go?” her father demanded.

  “That’s no longer your concern, is it?” she countered.

  Her grandpa searched the dead man’s pockets and got eight more of the twelve gauge shells and a pocket knife.

  “I’ll take the knife too since I won’t be taking anything of yours,” she snarled. Her mom gathered the shells and knife up without being asked and put them in a plastic shopping bag. She approached but gave Eileen the courtesy of sitting them on the floor a couple steps short rather than handing them off.

  “You’ll be at the spring gathering won’t you?” her mom asked.

  “I imagine so,” Eileen agreed.

  “I’ll bring a bundle of your things,” her mother promised.

  “If they let you,” Eileen said, eyes flickering between the men.

  “They damn well will or I can find someplace else to live too,” Cindy said. It turned out the fellows could look even more shocked than they already were.