Been There, Done That (April Book 10)

by Mackey Chandler

  “That seems naive. He could have caused all sorts of mischief and sabotage.”

  “Really? He was in a very similar position, with the North Americans, like agent 71 finds himself with us,” Paul said.

  “Yes, I can see that,” Markus decided.

  “Within a week the North Americans did the same as you considered doing with our man. He was found in the kitchen freezer quite dead.”

  Markus got it. “How coldly calculating, she’d have been kinder to shoot him down on the spot… he was a tethered goat. But it was stupid of them to reveal they had the reach to get to him there.”

  “But you want to do the same thing?” Paul asked.

  “Oh… ”

  “I don’t care to take the chance that if she could know agent 71 was ours on Mars, she doesn’t know much more about our organization, including our actual identities. If we touched somebody under her protection I’d expect retribution, fearless, excessive retribution, because with them it’s personal.”

  “Her peer April is the young lady who politely informed North American control not to fire upon her friend Jeff, the other peer. She quite calmly told them if they did she’d put a stop to it. That was Vandenberg, their preeminent missile defense base guarding their Pacific coast.

  “They decided to take a shot at him and ignore her. Their main missile defense base could not even protect itself. She overwhelmed it with hundreds of kinetic weapons from every direction, multiple low yield weapons and blinding sheets of plasma that disabled the base’s radars until it lay open and defenseless to the final strike.

  “The site is now a featureless shallow valley dimpled by a three hundred megaton weapon that pushed the bedrock down into the earth so hard it was felt all the way from Vancouver to the end of the Baja. It also pretty well destroyed the surrounding vital infrastructure in an area bigger than France.

  “If they wouldn’t hesitate to do that to North America they certainly wouldn’t think a thing of dropping a small weapon on our building. Or if their intelligence is as good as these two claim, perhaps just a tank killer rod from orbit through your office would suffice.”

  “I knew about the California thing. I thought that was Home people.”

  “They hold dual citizenship and flit back and forth,” Paul said.

  “I see your point. The risks do seem far out of proportion to any possible gain. We’ll speak no more of it,” Markus said, turned the screen back to himself, reactivating the recording program.

  * * *

  “How did you manage that?” Eileen asked, surprised but delighted. She’d seen all sorts of personal things for sale at the festival, but not any wedding rings.

  “It’s our gold,” Vic said. “I wasn’t sure about my ability to get it hot enough to melt and mold it, so I took the fine flakes and tiny nuggets and drove them into a little form I cut in a piece of scrap. It would have been easier back when we had power, but a ranch has all kinds of bits and pieces to work with. I smashed them down with a punch I made from pipe, heated it up, and added more on top to do it all over again until I had it built up. It’s sintered or I guess forged and pressure welded is just as accurate to say. Then I had to peen it on that hard pin I bought at the festival, and polish it. Try it, please. I just guessed the sizing, and I can slip it back on the tapered pin and hammer it down a bit until it isn’t as tight, or polish the edge rounder if it’s too sharp.”

  Eileen twisted it on. “It’s snug, but I want to leave it that way. I don’t want to be able to fling it off by just waving my hand and lose it. It’s nice and smooth too. You’re a man of many talents.”

  “If you change your mind I can adjust it any time,” Vic offered.

  “I’d really like it if you’d make one for yourself too,” Eileen requested.

  “OK, I may not wear it working, but I’ll wear it to festivals and such.”

  “That exactly what I had in mind,” Eileen agreed.

  * * *

  Heather wanted to get quickly rid of the fellow standing before her who’d come in angry and proceeded to make a fool of himself. He’d basically been offended by the man he was denouncing, and too stubborn and full of himself to take the man’s apology. If he’d suffered some material loss she could have made him whole, but his only loss was to his pride. It was a shame, because she needed both of them in their current jobs. More to the point she needed them to work together. He didn’t seem disposed to wrap his plea up. She hated to cut him off because it looked bad, but he was pushing it.

  All the while Heather was very aware that the French spy, Adam, was sitting on the petitioner’s bench all twitchy and nervous. She was as eager to be done with these other cases and to hear what he wanted as he was, but first come first served was a set tradition already when they had so few. It wasn’t worth destroying it to serve her own impatience.

  She was also in a bit of a bad mood because Jeff and April had to run back to Home and that made her grouchy. She couldn’t afford to be seen as a moody sovereign, dangerous to approach. At least these two standing before her weren’t her sworn men. If one of her handpicked people acted stupid she always felt it reflected poorly on her that she’d accepted their oath. He took a breath and she jumped in at the slight pause.

  “Mr. Hadley, I’m not clear on what you want me to do. You haven’t suffered a material loss to correct. I’m not about to start fining folks for hurting other’s feelings. It’s pointless to command him to repeat an apology he’s already given freely. What he said was hurtful, but I’m by no means certain he wasn’t basically correct about your personality. I need both of you, but among the god-like powers of a sovereign the ability to wave a magic wand and make people like each other and get along seems to have been left out of my beginners tool kit.

  “I’m not sure even exiling one of you would keep this from coming to haunt Central in the future. I see no clear way to resolve this satisfactorily, but then sometimes there is no good easy solution. Therefore I give you one opportunity to resolve it randomly.” She reached in her pocket and took a Solar, flipping it to Hertz who was standing slightly behind his accuser Hadley.

  “I’m writing down either heads or tails,” Heather said, scratching something out on a paper pad. She then flipped it over on its face. “If you wish me to resolve this, tell Mr. Hertz to flip the coin and both of you tell me what is displayed. I will then shoot Mr. Hadley dead if it matches my pad or Mr. Hertz if it is the opposite. The survivor is welcome to come forward and examine my notepad to assure my justice was completely impartial.”

  Hadley’s mouth worked but nothing came out. He turned to Hertz and said, “I don’t know how we came to this point. I never wanted you dead. I don’t want you to flip that coin. Just give it back to her please.”

  “We got here because you’re a butt-head, and wouldn’t let it go. I wasn’t about to keep groveling over and over because I told you an uncomfortable truth. If you don’t come to realize that you’ll just end up back here, probably with the other person being the petitioner instead of you. I’m not sure I shouldn’t take the risk to be rid of you. It’s about the same odds as if we dueled.”

  Hertz opened his palm and scooped the coin into the crook of his index finger with his thumb, poised to flip.

  “Don’t do it Art. If she shoots you it will haunt me forever. People will hate me, and with good reason. I’m so sorry. If you agree not to flip it I’ll go to Armstrong. I’ll self banish, and you won’t have to deal with me anymore.”

  “That’s sufficient for me. We’ve both apologized and it’s over. Whether you go to Armstrong or not is up to you.” He walked forward and put the coin on Heather’s table and returned.

  “My Lady,” Hadley said, visibly shaken, “I’m sorry we wasted your time. I respectfully submit we have resolved our case and I wish to withdraw my complaint.”

  “Don’t ‘My Lady’ me,” Heather told him. “You aren’t my sworn man and aren’t likely to ever achieve that status. I want the two of you to
clear out of here, and if I ever see you walk in my court together again I’ll shoot the both of you on sight before I ever hear a word from you. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Most clear, thank you.” They didn’t quite run for the door.

  “And you… ” Heather said to her last petitioner, Adam. “What can I do for you? March up here to the little rug and let me hear your story.”

  “You know the back-story,” Adam said. “I called my boss, which wasn’t easy without an agency channel, and asked about reporting in. They basically don’t repatriate an agent who has been out of their control too long. It’s simply too dangerous. The state of the art right now favors conditioning over their ability to detect and counter it.

  “I’d be given a very safe boring clerical job to suffer through until I hit my retirement age. I expect I’d have to allow them to track me seamlessly, and I suspect border control would be alerted not to let me out of the country. For me I don’t see much difference in that from being in prison.

  “Now, to be honest, Central isn’t my first choice. I’d like to have resumed something resembling my previous life, doing the work I know and in the country where I grew up, but as I was reminded it doesn’t work that way. I’m asking if I may stay here as a refugee? I’m not stupid or without skills that fall outside spy craft. I’ll do my best to add to the community and see to your interests if you will tolerate me.”

  “You don’t ask for asylum or citizenship?” Heather asked.

  “I’m not terribly sure what the difference is between residency and citizenship is here. I did see clearly being sworn is not something you toss out like party favors. Asylum… well that implies protection. You said you do business with France, so I can’t very well ask you to go against your own interests if it would provoke France. I don’t have any idea if you do extradition.

  “If I’m an inconvenience I could go to one of the other Moon bases, but I have no personal documents, what I had was on Mars and they were false anyhow. I somehow doubt France will produce valid copies of my real identity papers and send them off to me here. Entry at Marseille or Armstrong might be difficult.”

  “Extradition would be at my discretion on a case by case basis,” Heather said. “I haven’t had any other jurisdiction ask for anyone to be delivered to them. I can imagine circumstances in which I’d do that, but not under duress.

  “Residency is open to anyone unless I exclude them. We don’t have enough people, and if you can make your way here and support yourself you may reside. The expense of that is a formidable barrier without adding to it. I don’t offer any support if you can’t make a go of it here on your own. There are no negative tax or government subsidies.

  “Citizenship is tied to owning property or being sworn to me or of my peerage, which is a step well above landed citizenship and can’t be bought with the same sort of coin. Land is something I do grant occasionally rather than income. Let me ask you a question. If I granted you an estate, would you be prepared to renounce your French citizenship to assume that of Central? Would you accept my governance?”

  “That goes to the core of my identity,” Adam admitted, disturbed. “I’ve been loyal to France, and France has been loyal to me, if in diminished terms. Like most nations they are too big to worry about how they treat individuals except as a faceless composite. It’s impossible for me to speak to France face to face like I’m talking to you. It’s more like I might get the attention of the little toe. I rather like having access like this. It’s like I’m important.”

  “I can be arbitrary too,” Heather warned him.

  “In the case before mine you were arbitrary,” Adam acknowledged. “But even there, I saw you were being arbitrary by design, not because your rule is too huge and complex to avoid it. Rather, I saw your intent in doing so, and it worked.

  “I think this is the best deal I’m going to get, and better than I expected when I walked in here. If you will gift me being a landed gentleman I will try to serve the interests of my adopted country.”

  “I can see to the land, but the gentrification will have to be your own project. Dakota will give you a deed to an outlaying property as a legal matter when we are done. It’s bare lunar rock and regolith, so you can’t go there to live.”

  She looked at her pad. “Dakota, register a bearer deed to lot 612 and print a hard copy out for us.”

  “You can stay in our guest room for a few days, but basically you are going to have to accept some local employment and rent accommodations in pressure and in the local business and government complex to support yourself.”

  Adam dipped his head slowly in a little bow to accept that.

  “Now… about work. There are private employers if you wish to log in the local net and see who is offering what. If you wish to work for the kingdom, that’s me, there are all sorts of openings, but be aware we switch people around to different jobs as the need arises. I have no doubt some find that frustrating because they tell me, but it’s often necessary. If you would supply Dakota a copy of your skills it would be very helpful. Do not hesitate to include things for which you have no professional certification. If you for example can drive a ground car or truck but have no license, we’re not terribly concerned about that. Not until you get to the level of piloting spacecraft, and testing for that sort of license can be arranged.

  “I know they currently are way understaffed on interior finishers, to seal and foam new cubic and add all the utilities and amenities. They are also short of good people in the cabbage mines, but unless you know a great deal about horticulture, gene editing, or food processing you’d be starting from scratch there too. The thing is I hate to waste your primary skills, because we’ve had very little in the way of plotting and rebellion among the cabbages.”

  Adam blinked taken aback by the abrupt switch in narrative, but Heather had paused and was peering at him intensely, so she’d said that so glibly to throw him off balance, and it worked.

  “It never occurred to me you might want to recruit my primary skills,” he admitted. “I assumed I was as tainted for that duty here as for France.”

  “It helps not to be a raving paranoid,” Heather assured him. “Also there is a certain love of bureaucracy and endless rules and worship of authority most of us up here have come to call Earth Think, which gets in the way of accomplishing anything. Paranoia is fine when it has a rational basis in reality. But not as a knee jerk reaction to everything. Might you have been conditioned? Yes, but what are the chances both France and the Martians conspired to condition you to a set of responses aimed at Central, knowing you would arrive here? That’s crazy.”

  “In truth, I’m conditioned to working for crazy people,” Adam sighed.

  “Dear God, isn’t that the truth of it?” Heather said.

  “So what are you proposing?” Adam asked.

  “Work for me doing various rotating jobs. Become familiar with the boring operations and cubic finishing. Take a few turns at the cabbage mines and anything else that comes open. I bet you can service an electric cart or a lot of things that can go wrong with a rover. When you’ve done that for a couple months you will have enough experience to talk about living on the Moon convincingly and have a plausible background.

  “Our neighbors in Marseille are engaged in an expansion to build a ship building facility. If you go over and inquire about work with a keen interest in better wages you might be able to get a job where you’d be able to collect useful information. If you can’t get a job right in their shipbuilding facility, perhaps you could find one in a support position where the workers would talk to you. Your preference for using your native tongue and culture can be given as a reason to want to transfer over.

  “I have a few skills that a ship yard might use. If not, I’m an accomplished bartender. I’ve found that a really good bartender is as hard to find as a decent Systems Engineer.”

  “See? I don’t have to tell you how to do this.” Heather said.

  “I might be m
ore exposed to France there than here,” Adam pointed out.

  “I thought you didn’t want to be stuck in a boring desk job as a primary reason not to return to France? If you want a risk free boring desk job – how are you with spread sheets?” Heather asked brightly.

  “No need to threaten me,” Adam said showing both palms to her in mock horror. “I’m with your program. No need to imprison me in a green work cubby with timed restroom breaks.”

  “We aren’t that cruel,” Heather assured him. “But I think you would find your customary work more stimulating. Unlike your former employers I was very impressed that you managed to escape Mars. It’s a real snake pit, and I feel like I have to go wash my hands every time we do business with them.”

  “It is, and when France refused to take me back in they threw away their best intelligence on Mars. I don’t think they know what’s really going on there yet. Your people obviously have better intelligence. Certainly more cost effective when you consider they pay billions of EuroMarks a year for intelligence.”

  “You have to consider that they need to cover just about anything on Earth that could cause them problems, but we are interested in very little that doesn’t impact space directly. I would hope our intelligence in that much more limited area is better, but let’s keep it that way,” Heather commanded.

  Chapter 25

  “I’m going to go visit your father and see what conditions are like on the Moon. It’s bad enough your sister has effectively emancipated herself far too early by any decent standard, but you are far too young to leave here to run wild in the corridors and get in God only know what sort of trouble,” Linda Pennington said.

  “Mother, you haven’t paid any attention to where I go or what I do during the day for a year. If I was disposed to get in trouble I would have, and you have been no restraint on me at all. There have been days I never came home from when I left the one G sleeping dorm until I went back. This isn’t Earth where you are going to be charged with a crime for not having me supervised constantly.