They Said It Would Be Easy (April Book 7)

by Mackey Chandler

  Huian looked perfectly composed as she fixed her chop on the document and thanked the men. They took their carts and left.

  Tetsuo raised one eyebrow quite high and silently regarded her.

  "I have been doing some independent investment for our family, just as you have had Lin do. I'm sorry my business interrupted your day. The young woman with who I have been dealing on Earth had a sudden need, and sent these items for me to safe guard them. We spoke of that possibility already, but circumstances forced her to act. I'll get them out of our entry as soon as possible," Huian promised.

  "This is your home too," Tetsuo told Huian graciously. "They are convenient here, should we need a door stop. So, if you'll excuse me, I'll go back to my reading." He retreated unconcerned to his book, as if they always kept a stack of London Good Delivery gold bars in the foyer. It wasn't his concern. Nor would he mention it to Chen, he decided with some amusement.

  * * *

  "If we're going to do much business on Home I have a sneaky feeling we should know who that man is," the second in charge on their team said as they walked away.

  "Because he had automated security?" the leader asked. "Dude, anybody stacking gold bars in his entry has reason to have some serious security. We may never see him again. In fact if the lady had been home we'd have never seen him today."

  "We don't know they were gold bars," Zeb insisted.

  "Yeah, somebody dropped a few hundred thousand dollars to kick priority freight off the pre-paid queue on the next shuttle lifting, and have it couriered by crew for never-leave-your-sight delivery to their door, for tungsten bars. That's the only other thing that would be as heavy."

  "Well, probably gold bars," the second admitted. He was the sort who would argue the sky wasn't blue if he hadn't seen it today. "I'd still like you to ask. You have helmet pix of him don't you?"

  "OK, Zeb. I'll ask just to humor you," His pad had a one touch to contact his superiors.

  "Control this is Thad. Coming off armed escort to a delivery on Home for Larkin Lines. We are done and no problems. There was a person of interest to us. He made my partner nervous," he said, getting a dig in. "Tetsuo was the only name give. They seem to be stingy with full names here, but this is his face off my helmet camera."

  They ran searches on faces all the time. Usually people they suspected of surveilling them. A data base of such people was just prudent. When the same person was caught watching them repeatedly at multiple locations it wasn't coincidence. But sometimes it was hours before they got a reply. This time they only got as far as the lift at the end of the corridor and Thad get a priority squeal in his ear.

  "This is Earl Sasser, Vice President for Operations Asia. The gentleman in your image is regarded as a DO-NOT-TOUCH. That includes anyone associated with him or any location or activity observed. You are not to engage him or interfere with him, nor associate the company with him in any way even if in your opinion it would be a positive. Actions on behalf of a client will not extend to interacting with this man for them. You are instructed to wipe your camera memory of him, forget you saw him and do not engage in idle gossip or speculation about him on or off duty in the future. Do you have any other questions?"

  It seemed like a really bad time to have any questions. "No sir. Thank you."

  The contact ended without any more pleasantries.

  "Dude, wipe your camera, then wipe your brain. We don't know the guy, we never saw him or his, and we don't ever want to have anything to do with him. VP Ops says he is DO-NOT-TOUCH. Got it?"

  "Whoa...Got it."

  Chapter 10

  "I have present for you," Jeff told April. He had his hand behind his back and brought it around dramatically. There was a round black ball in it. He let go of it between them. It just hung there.

  April leaned over inspecting it all around where it floated. It was the size of a grapefruit.

  "I'm impressed. It's even quieter than the toy. It's a little rounder and bigger, but not too much."

  "I took your toy along to Dave's shop when I had business there. He has such an odd collection of designers and machinists with exotic skills. I wanted to see what they'd think of it. I caught them all having lunch break together and they were fascinated by it. He had a fellow who worked on Israeli drones who helped a lot. They had it all disassembled where that's possible and cut apart in sections where it was bonded together in no time. You notice it has a sort of belt around it now instead of triangular openings?"

  "Yes, the air flows out of that?" April asked.

  "Indeed it does, and it clings to the surface as it flows and creates a high pressure region under it, not just a jet action. It has active noise cancellation, and two sets of three depth sensing cameras to let it hold location while it is escorting you. When we get a weapon installed the cameras will give it excellent targeting and range sensing. You can control it with your spex, and adjust where you want it to stay in relation to you," Jeff said, proudly.

  "Let me try," April said. After a few minutes she could move it, then she mastered locking it to hold a location to her. She put it right by the edge of her left shoulder, but trailing enough she had to turn her head to see it.

  "It can be made to track where you are looking from your spex," Jeff said, and walked her through that menu. "Now slave a window to my spex and watch it work."

  It was neat. It floated there right behind her shoulder, but when her eyes moved the triangle of camera lenses on the front rolled to where she was looking. By checking off a box a pale ring floated in her spex marking where it was pointed. Which would be a targeting ring eventually.

  "I think you'll like this. If you blink twice fast while you have the target ring engaged see what it does for you," Jeff invited.

  April followed the instructions and said, "Oh yes! That was creepy. How did it do that?"

  "The whole thing pulses out the vents, and gives out a eighteen hertz pulse that drops quickly in power and frequency to about twelve hertz. Then it can't do it any lower and just fades out."

  "It made me suck my breath in and...I'm not sure how to describe it. Not pleasant at all."

  Jeff nodded. "It produces anxiety, dread even. It's a tool that might make somebody hesitate or reconsider, but if somebody is afraid or ready to shoot it could push them over the edge."

  "I want two of them. One to float over each shoulder," April decided.

  "Maybe you should write a routine so every once in awhile one lifts and does an orbit above you and comes back. Like it's somewhat smart or autonomous, and is scouting the surroundings," Jeff suggested, demonstrating the path with his hand.

  "Have you ever considered doing horror movies?" April wondered. "I'd like to keep this a bit and see how people react to it."

  "Knock yourself out," Jeff invited, "just remember it's not weaponized yet."

  "Yeah, tell me when you want it back to install that stuff," April invited.

  * * *

  "Did you see there were some Trinity Security guys in the cafeteria?" Chen asked Gunny.

  "No! I'm shocked," Gunny said. He was squeezing his exercise ball like it was a living thing he wanted to throttle. Chen wondered if Gunny realized he made faces while he did that?

  "That they got a gig for Home?" Chen asked.

  "No, that they've had the same name now almost three years. And they are using the bear print logo again," Gunny said, making a clawed swipe in the air with his good hand. "Usually they screw up and the logo leads some reporter to explore their long sordid history. Then they get a new name and a fresh logo for awhile to get the heat off, but it's always the same cowboys running it. Rinse and repeat."

  "I'm just sorry we didn't get the work. I asked the Larkin Line guy if we offended somebody, but he said they got the hot load unexpectedly through ISSII, and had to hire local to bring it out here," Chen said. "The Larkin Line shuttle is laying over loading, so they'll take the late passenger shuttle back."

  "That makes sense then," Gunny allowed. "If we e
scorted it they'd have had the hot freight sitting waiting for us to get there. Slower and they'd be paying double for somebody to guard it there waiting for us. But how did they avoid quarantine?" Gunny suddenly remembered.

  "They came in from Armstrong, and haven't had contact with any Earth vectors for a week. They went from the moon shuttle straight across the dock to the Larkin Line ship, and that was plenty good for Jon. He's trying to be reasonable about it. Everybody's sick of it. Makes you wonder what was so hot, with freight crazy expensive and backed up now," Chen said.

  * * *

  "How long to make one reliable working model?" Jon asked. He was wearing a face mask, and wearing gloves. They were in a Holiday Inn room, and Dr. Houghton would stay there for four days in quarantine. He'd come from an urban area in North America so he was a risk. "It doesn't have to be pretty. It doesn't have to be cheap. Then you can worry about making it compact with a nice housing, and able to be printed cheap at your leisure, once we have a working sample."

  "I'm pretty sure we can have a working sample in two weeks, once I start working. Maybe a little faster if we get priority from the fab shops. If they are like the one my university had on Earth, even before the flu they were all backed up and scheduled into the future, and you had to spend a couple days just filling out all the paper work to get approved for your project," Dr. Houghton said, frowning.

  "It's going to be a culture shock for you," Jon predicted. "If anybody tries to make red tape here chances are they'll be found with it applied as a neck tourniquet. I'm going to introduce you to Jeff Singh. Besides me, you might regard him as your primary sponsor here. I don't have room for you in Home Security. It would be stretching my discretion to add you to my roster as a researcher. We are however covering your Holiday Inn bill. The usual quarantine quarters are lacking in privacy and gravity. We're expecting you to start work in quarantine. You'll have access to the local net and can conference with anybody you need to instruct, or send specifications to fab something. What you'll call your job and what pay you receive you'll have to talk over with Jeff. I've never known him to be cheap."

  "I guess it may look crazy to come up here with all those things unsettled," Houghton said. "But it was never going to happen easily, like moving inside the USNA. I heard you have a labor shortage, so I figured I'd do OK even if my deal with you guys didn't crystallize. I understand prices are high here?"

  "Any cubic big enough to sleep in, a bed and a locker for your stuff, is going to cost you three thousand USNA dollars a week, five thousand for something that's a real room, and it's getting worse fast. Nobody will even commit to a lease. Not even for six months. You can rent a shared hot slot to sleep with no storage and no bath, but that's no way to live. Mostly those are rented by shuttle crew or couriers who are on lay-over and don't want to spend their per diem on a hotel room," Jon explained.

  "If you have Earth accounts in USNA dollars they will make it difficult to transfer them here. If you have a card best just to spend them down for day to day expenses. Jeff will give you a little tour, when you can get out of quarantine, and try to show you what's needed. It's very, very different than Earth. Now that we're independent of North America it just gets further away from their norms almost by the day." Jon warned. "I don't have time to acclimate you. Jeff will spend time with you."

  "As soon as I knew I might get a chance to come up I started taking the daily limit out of my account. So I have some cash, but since I could only withdraw a thousand a day I bought gold chains from a jeweler. He gave me a little better deal because I promised to buy at least one a day. Every day about lunch time I went over and bought a chain, and the last day I told him to sell me whatever he could. I wore all fifty six around my neck coming up. It felt weird and I had to wear baggy clothing, but I was scared to put them in my luggage. This was just an unexpected chance for me to leave Earth. I never anticipated it, but I wasn't going to miss a once in a lifetime opportunity get away either."

  "Wasn't that uncomfortable?" Jon asked.

  "Yes, and I was afraid if I fell overboard I'd go down like a rock," Houghton confided.

  "Apparently you don't have just book smarts," Jon said, approvingly. "You'll do OK."

  * * *

  "So, tell me. Is Home really as strange as everybody tells me?" Dennis asked his buddy and co-worker Zeb back at ISSII.

  Zeb looked at him funny, like he was testing him. "There's stuff I can't talk about. Better not to discuss it at all than maybe mess up and say something I shouldn't."

  "I don't want to know about the job," Dennis clarified. "What's the hab like? What are the people like? Have they grown devil horns yet, like the news would have you think? Or are they racing up and down the corridors in body paint and feathers on roller skates?"

  "Oh, well, I've never seen so many people armed in public before. I mean, almost every blessed one of them. No standardization either. Not like the hab issued them weapons. I saw old revolvers and new laser weapons, knives and stuff. I even saw a guy with an old Russian Mosin slung on his back. If you shot that inside a compartment everybody would be deaf for a week. And almost no old people or young people. I think most of them must have life extension work." Zeb thought about it a little and looked at Dennis. "It's been a long time since I've seen so many people smiling."

  "Do they look like they've been on short rations like us?" Dennis wondered.

  "The menu board was pretty short in their cafeteria. I didn't see anybody very fat. But we got supper there, and what they had was good. The lady running the place was real chatty, and when she found out we were taking the late shuttle back she brought us all a sack lunch to eat on the shuttle. She didn't ask for our cards again to charge us, and she knew what to put in that would be easy to eat in zero G. Everything was about ten or twenty percent higher priced than here."

  "Maybe she was sweet on you guys, seeing some handsome new fellows."

  "Nah, she wasn't flirting. She was more like mothering us. I think she was older, but you can't tell there anymore, with everybody looking vaguely middle aged. Oh! And the coffee machine was ugly as hell. Bare stainless and obviously handmade. We asked about that and she changed faces real fast, looked really TO'd, and said, 'Some flaming jackass shot the old one.' I didn't ask any more seeing her reaction."

  "Well, at least they have coffee," Dennis pointed out.

  "Yeah, it was instant, and there was a little sign saying please don't waste it, and promising that they would improve the quality as soon as possible. But really, it was better than some nasty cheap coffee from grounds I've had," Zeb said.

  "So, nobody was hostile to you in company gear and obviously not local?" Dennis wondered.

  "Never had anybody so much as frown at us...Oh! Except this one girl. She was eating there, and a couple people stopped and talked to her. Cute but kind of young. She finished up about the same time as us, and when Thad got up to leave she was passing with her tray to dump, and he got in her way, not on purpose, but doing the little-which-way-do-I-duck dance like when you meet somebody head on going through a narrow doorway. She had some king of a bot floating over her shoulder." He showed with his hands how big. "Quiet as can be. And when she looked at Thad the ball turned and followed her eyes," he said, making a scanning motion with two fingers. "Now, you tell me what that is," Zed invited.

  "Targeting system," Dennis said, without hesitation. "Like a gunship pilot."

  "Uh huh. On a teenage girl. Never saw anything like it. Not even in the service. When she blinked like Thad startled her, it scared the crap out of me. I got this weird unreasoning feeling of dread deep in my gut, because I thought she was triggering a fire command."

  "Now that's a story," Dennis said.

  * * *

  "Dr. Houghton, I'm Jeff Singh. I'm very pleased to meet you. Why don't we skip shaking since you are in quarantine?" Jeff had on a mask and face shield. He also had on several sets of gloves so he could shed a pair without needing to pull fresh on.

  "I regist
ered a com ID for you and brought a pair of spex for you. They'll let you input the same ID into the room com too," He laid the new spex on the table.

  "This is a cafeteria card. You can check the menu on com, and anything not special order is covered by the card. Although you are in isolation the cafeteria will deliver by courier. They'll put it inside the emergency airlock. We have it set on manual while you are in quarantine. Normally the inside curtain doesn't close unless it senses a pressure drop. They'll spray your container and bag it after you are done and put it back in the entry. It goes to the clinic then for sterilization before the cafeteria.

  "My address is already in your spex," Jeff said. "I've put you on my priority list, as long as you don't abuse it you'll stay there. Now, we want you to build this device for us, but how we get there isn't nearly as important to us. I'm sorry we didn't have opportunity to hammer out all these details beforehand. We've fulfilled our side of the bargain so far by getting you up here. But now, do you want to work as an independent contractor directing the development within my organization, or do you want to work for me as an employee? I'll hire you if you wish."

  "I'm not sure I'd fit the definition of an independent contractor. I know I wouldn't in North America. They've gotten so it's almost impossible to define a business relationship that way. Have your laws here divulged from that significantly? Houghton asked.

  "This is often difficult to explain," Jeff said. "When we removed ourselves from North America we dropped all USNA law. The Assembly has steadfastly refused to start formulating new law. There are very few decisions about what you can and can't do on Home, and we are accumulating customs at a much faster pace than laws. So there are no laws about how to define employment, just custom and what agreements we come to. We can define almost anything we wish in a contract."

  "How do you see the difference between my being a contractor or an employee?" Houghton asked.

  "If you work for me as a contractor then you are on board for a term until this virus sensor is assembled and deployed. After that you're cut loose if you wish, you won't owe me anything and can do as you please, or we might agree to start another project. We don't have non-compete agreements for after employment ends. At least I haven't heard of anyone trying to use them. I doubt you could hire anyone demanding that. We don't have patents. We do have trade secrets, but this wouldn't be covered by that. We're more interested in the device for our own use than as a product. I'd expect that once I know how to make the virus sensor I could continue to do so. I can even engage in research to alter and improve them.