April

by Mackey Chandler

  "This unit is not equipped to sense optical signals. You are to be advised to consult the maker if I am unable to perform any request."

  April felt good she had something to request, when she saw Heather. No use letting them think they had thought of everything. A fiber port and an external camera seemed a reasonable thing to request.

  For some reason she wasn't comfortable, after Art, to close herself up in her room. It might be a bit before she got over her unease and back to normal, so she accessed her Japanese history class from the com desk in the living room. The seat was still set for her dad and she reset it for her preferences feeling it lower and flatten under her and get softer. April slid the cover back on the keyboard. It was almost impossible to do a full study session by voice, without having to key something in. She uncovered it and switched the keys, from the Japanese mode her dad had set to American English and turned the animation off. Images on the keys swimming around or flashing on the edge of her vision just irritated her. It was still too quiet in here too. She put on a little instrumental music and reset the wall screen her dad usually left on a still pic to a cam.

  Flicking through the nature pix, she found a live feed of zebra grazing somewhere. She was getting behind the rest of the class in this course and got back into it, watching the professor's latest lecture and going through the other students' comments and questions. Her mom would be checking her progress with her classes when she came home soon and April didn't want to spoil her return with an immediate controversy.

  She set her hand pad to the side, with the stocks she was holding streaming. If they traded up or down, the color change would catch her eye. Multitasking her lessons, the live screen and music, as well as the market quotes, felt about right. Less would be boring.

  She figured Art wore an Earth style blazer to conceal his weapon. If her idea worked out with Heather, that was something she'd need. She thought she could accomplish it with a little more style for herself. While she was still at the com she did a search for costumes - capes and found a theatrical supply which carried them. She ordered several of them in various sizes and fabrics.

  If she made gifts of them to the right people, they would be a common sight in no time. She arranged FedEx delivery. Every time she tried UPS they ripped her for some new fee, or they had the customs broker in their pocket to add charges.

  A sudden flurry of activity caught her eye on the wall screen. She looked up just in time to see all the zebra exit the cam view, in a dusty desperate scramble. Behind them a sleek shape ripped through the coarse tan grass, almost the same color and too low to see clearly. Lion! she immediately guessed.

  This is how I felt this morning with Art, she thought, watching the zebra scatter. I don't ever want to feel that way again. If I have to play the game at all, I want to be the lioness.

  All the fatigue of the stressful day weighed on her at once, so she said, "Log-off," went in her room telling the room "lights out," and lay face down on her bed without even undressing. I'll just catch a little nap before supper, she thought and was asleep before she had drawn her second breath.

  Chapter 6

  April woke up with her face on a cold slobber spot. She rolled away disgusted and called the lights up. The screen clock said Tuesday, October 5, 2083 - 06:32. She stumbled into her bathroom, a little stunned from sleeping too long and peeled off the clothes she'd slept in. When she had a pile made, she kicked the whole thing outside the door. The entire tiny room became a shower stall with the door closed. It was small, but nonetheless, it was still an uncommon luxury on station, to have a private bath of any size. At first she soaped up in a warm mist, but ordered the shower cooler by degrees, until it was chill enough to be a little jarring before she cut the flow. That chased away the last lingering traces of the fogginess. Instead of an air blast she took a towel from storage and rubbed hard with the coarse material between her toes and behind her knees, the sensation invigorating.

  April thought about her supper tonight with Heather and Jeff. She didn't want to wear sweats, even nice ones, like she did so often. Out of the shower she picked something nicer, black tights and a long belted black tunic with a hood.

  When she left her room her dad was sitting at the com with a mug of coffee, working. It was a workday but he was in casual clothes, jeans and an Earth style print shirt. What she became sure of as she got closer and inspected her dad, was he had been up all night. There was stubble on his chin, droopiness around his eyes and the back of the shirt was all wrinkled from leaning back in the chair. He worked hard as director. They didn't allow him an assistant or secretary, using one Earthside by com instead, but pulling an all-nighter was unusual.

  She walked around the back of the com desk to avoid the camera, got her own mug of coffee and a couple biscuit sandwiches started in the microwave to take the edge off her hunger. She pulled a chair over outside the camera range and started on the sandwiches, waiting to have a word before leaving. She let the spex run the updated news and market report she had tagged past her. He knew she was there, but it was their family's firm custom not to interrupt each other on the com.

  He ended abruptly as usual and blanked the screen. When he pivoted around to give her his full attention, he laced his hands behind his neck and leaned back in the chair. He was a slight man, economical with his motions like so many spacers, trained to think before moving and so given to small moments of stillness between his movements. He was one of the few men she thought of as graceful. His hair was a darker version of hers, with speckles of gray and no longer a match for the newly youthful face beneath it.

  But his eyes were older than anything else, speaking of hard experience no medicine was going to remove.

  "I'm was asked to offer you a job by my section head," he said, looking amused, "but I already declined to allow it, so it's moot except as a compliment to you."

  "Wow, I was spending the money in my mind, as soon as you said job and then >whap< you knocked it right down. What section? Housekeeping again?"

  "No," he smiled ruefully at her guess, "Mrs. Morgan knows you'll go around picking up litter, even if she doesn't pay you, so where's the incentive to waste money on what you will do for free? I'm afraid we are talking about Jon Davis, my new Security Chief. I'm not ready to OK you working in something so hazardous quite yet."

  "Is this the Art thing?" she asked, excited at some news. "Did you find out anything about him at all?"

  "Oh, we found out a few things about this young man, but we have more questions now than when we started. The big news is you seem to have spooked him to flight, so he's not even in M3 anymore. So there is no immediate risk, unless he left something unpleasant behind. Since it doesn't seem to be an emergency anymore, we were waiting for you to wake up. I assured him you would be much sharper if we allowed you to sleep. If we call him up now there are a few questions he has been saving for you," he suggested.

  "Uh, there's something maybe you should know before we talk to Jon, in case you want me to be careful what I say," April offered.

  Her dad's expression just stayed completely neutral.

  She went on. "The reason this fellow scared me so badly and I warned you he might be armed, was because when he put his pad away he flapped his jacket open," she said, demonstrating with her hands, "I smelled the same stuff you use to clean your gun, the Hoppe's #9. I've never smelled anything else like it, so I'm sure that's what it was. Is that something you'd want me to mention to Jon?"

  "When I put Jon in charge of Security, I expressed my good opinion of him by trusting him with our lives. Not the Company with its rules, or whatever law reaches here, but for him personally to protect the people of M3, including us, from harm. I told him it was his only really important job, before all the silly little rules about who's allowed to sell cookies, or how many can live in a unit," her father explained.

  "You don't have to hide anything to protect me. I'll let you choose how much to volunteer and how much to make him ask, because the i
ssue is much more important than covering up some minor indiscretion of mine." He brought his hands down from behind his neck and smiled at her. "Ready?"

  With a shock, April realized there was no patronizing look, or diminutive kiddy name. He was treating her as she had always wanted. Not as an equal, she didn't think herself equal, but as an adult, with some respect. She replied, "Yes, Father."

  The formal tone caught his ear. She hadn't called him anything but Dad in a long time. But the only acknowledgment was a briefly raised eyebrow. Her dad zoomed the com camera out to cover both of them and made the connection.

  Jon answered from his residence. He was wearing a white dress shirt. By contrast he was so black beside the bright white, he had almost purplish tones. He was as bulky as her dad was slight, with a massive pillar of a neck and completely bald.

  "Ah, Sleeping Beauty! Glad to see you. I was ready to awaken you last night, but your father assured me you would be more coherent in the morning." He had a beautiful theatrical voice.

  Suddenly, he switched his tone and asked more seriously, "Did you sleep well?"

  The sudden shift threw her off balance and made her wonder if he was being sarcastic, but the question seemed genuine. Maybe this was some tactic he used for questioning. But he stopped and was waiting for a reply, so it did not seem rhetorical.

  "I slept well, thank you," and added politely, "and you sir?"

  "Sadly no, thank you, I have not got around to sleeping yet."

  April pegged the voice suddenly. It was the fellow speaking with the Australian security officer, in the scanner intercept yesterday.

  "I had some of my people seal off a room at the Holiday Inn, where your young man Art was staying. It does not set well with subordinates if you send them into potential harm and go off home to bed." He didn't mention the pair of corpses in the cable closet. The two events close together had his staff rattled and overworked. "Not that I blame you for my lack of sleep," he explained. "I'm actually very grateful for your calling our attention to the fellow."

  "The Holiday Inn? He told me he was a company intern, so I figured he would be in company rooms. In fact I mentioned to him he was lucky not to be stuck in an Animal House bunkroom, with all the construction workers."

  "He had a lot of interesting stories, all less than truthful and they were very difficult to weave together, without contradictions, in such a small community as ours. A number of people already noticed discrepancies in his statements. It would not have held together much longer, before somebody sounded the alarm. However, the privilege was yours."

  "He told Housekeeping he was looking to rent cubic for a family business, so they spent most of a shift showing him every empty space on M3. He also did have a reservation on the FedEx shuttle as he told you, but he wasn't on it. He bailed out early, even though he only had a half shift wait to go on the commercial shuttle. I think you'll be interested in how he left. Watch this," he commanded and his screen reduced to a small square in the corner.

  The video running was from a security camera in a large airlock, an easy fit for four people. There weren't many so big. The walls were the dull lime anodized finish, common in the industrial areas of the station without decoration. Art came in and it was zero G, but he handled himself with the smooth, experienced motions of someone completely at ease in micro-gravity.

  Ignoring the camera, Art took off his hard shoes, securing them to a grab ring by the laces. He was wearing sticky footies with separate toes, just like a pair of gloves. He grabbed a bar with his toes and stepped out of his pants with easy motions, transferring his grip from one foot to the other as easily as most people could use their hands, stripped the braided belt out of them and secured them by tying one leg around a take-hold ring. There were some small items he put in the cargo pockets on his shorts. He added some things from his blazer and tied it down by knotting a sleeve on the same take-hold ring. An innersole, peeled back, yielded a small case he carefully kept.

  From the waistband of his shorts he removed his com pad and the thin long weapon in a holster April had correctly suspected he carried. There was a second straight handle sticking up behind the reversed pistol grip. Those got clipped on the web belt he'd removed. He gave the wall a push and pivoted on his toehold to open the cabinet holding emergency p-suits. An alarm should have gone off then, so he must have disabled it.

  The small flat panel by the hatch, to display warnings and the progression of the lock cycle stayed dark. This told them he had the skills to have easily disabled the camera, but wanted to allow them to watch for some reason. He slid into the emergency suit so smoothly, it could have been a training video for using them.

  The suit was a 3M brand, by the logo on the shoulder, silvery for outside use from an airlock. He didn't need to pull the sizing straps, to gather the unused material, because he filled the suit up to its design limits. Once he was suited up, the belt with its hardware went back on, with the pad and holster centered in the small of his back, out of the way.

  When he was sealed and rigged, he reached back in the blazer and pulled out a vacuum rated marker, like the construction workers used on struts and girders. With easy, familiar strokes, he drew a laughing seal on the wall. Suspended over its nose was an Earth globe for a ball showing a rough outline of the Western Hemisphere.

  He cycled the outer door conventionally, not dumping the air in a hurry. So, he had started the pump down before he was in his suit. It was a huge safety violation to race the pressure drop suiting up, but he hadn't looked worried, or in a rush at all.

  When the hatch opened, the USNA shuttle she had seen yesterday was framed exactly in the middle of the opening - perhaps two hundred meters from the lock. Its top was toward the station in sunlight, so the wide flat top of the wedge shaped lifting body was presented toward the lock, to present its biggest cross section from their perspective. It was a pretty dazzling white dart, against the blue and brown Earth, with the cloudless Horn of Africa large behind it. A hatch on the top of the shuttle was open and its sharp shadow drew a long dark line down the top of the space plane. There was a soft suited crewman in the opening, with something in his hands she could not quite make out.

  Art positioned himself, gripping a take hold and braced against his feet. He drew back once, going through a trial motion and checked it. Then on the next try he pulled back, until his back filled the camera view. This time let go as he stretched both arms straight before him and jumped through the opening like a springboard diver. After he cleared the opening he brought his arms back with a rolling motion, which started his body making a slow turn.

  "It's going to zoom," Jon warned.

  As the shuttle started to show behind his contracting image the video did zoom, in steps, doubling and then again. The jumper tucked his legs up to turn faster and April could see now the waiting crewman held a coil of light line, with a tapered weight tied on the end. A throwing line, to toss across Art's path and pull him in, because he had no jetpack to maneuver with. However it was not needed, as he opened up from his tuck and landed on both feet, within arm's length of the open hatch, absorbing his motion in a squat. One glove slipped over the hatch edge and he pulled himself in head first, as smooth as an eel sliding in a hole.

  The crewman leaned back to give him room, knees against the rim of the hatch and gave him a fraternal backhanded swat on the butt as he went past. Then the crewman reached up to pull the hatch closed, but paused long enough to raise a single digit in disdainful salute toward their camera, before he closed it.

  "That boy has jumped once or twice before," was all April could say, really irritated by the performance, as Jon's image expanded back to fill the screen.

  "No kidding. If the construction guys take a little jump with no safety tether, the foremen will usually rip into them, but if a guy can jump like that, they just pretend not to see it."

  "Can you believe, he told me he was excited to be getting a chance at going out in a p-suit the next day?" She was embarrasse
d at being fooled so thoroughly.

  "April, he was here five days and everybody lapped up whatever story he was spinning. It's my department's job to know about people like him and we had, not-a-stinking-clue, he pronounced the tmesis slowly, with disgust. We were up all night, questioning people and everyone told us he was 'a-nice-young-man'," biting the words off. "The only clues we have are a few skin flakes and a couple hairs, enough to do a DNA match and some traces of propellant in the air of his room from outgassing. At least your conversation with him outside the radio shack, has sufficient fidelity to do a voice match on him."

  "You do audio recording in public spaces?" April asked, surprised. "I knew you have cameras in the corridors, but mics too?"

  "Well, just some key places I feel need protected, like the radio room. We really watch the business sections pretty closely, to keep the paying customers safe and happy."

  "Does that include the cafeterias, or public rest rooms?" she pressed.

  Jon balked, obviously not happy to have her asking questions of him.

  "Jon, I'll keep your secrets and help you, but I'm trusting you and expect you to trust me. Are we on the same side, or are we against each other?" she asked, but with no rancor at all. She could see her dad perk up at the tone their exchange had taken.

  "Peace, Sister," Jon said, holding his palms up to her. "I want you on my side when the lights go out and the air gets stale, no fooling, I do. I'd love to bug the cafeteria, but folks would crucify me if they found out. The restrooms down at the construction workers' cafeteria are bugged and no apology for that, because they sometimes do stuff in there, like sell dope, they can't do easily in an open barracks."

  "The restrooms in corporate row are bugged, so I can get someone in there quickly if there is trouble for our high rent customers. I don't allow an archive to be kept of anything from there, because you could get some insider stock tips and such from their indiscretions. You will keep this to yourself, won't you?" he asked, belatedly.