April 6: And What Goes Around

by Mackey Chandler

  What shocked Jeff was how often his bugs found other bugs. Jeff wondered just how many of the little machines were from news services, corporations, other governments, or one agency spying on another agency of their own government. After some thought he decided he didn't like the competition, and started designing ways to modify a standard bug to carry the means to damage or immobilize bugs from other owners. It still wasn't worth designing a dedicated fighter bug. The standard sort could carry simple light weapons. A bug could grasp another opposing bug and immobilize it by sacrificing itself. That could be programmed in quickly but it was an expensive solution. A spear that released a contact adhesive when poked at opposition machines was his first idea. It immobilized limbs or wings and made them attach to anything they touched in passing. Also a capacitive discharge to fry the other machine's electronics. That also meant all his new machines needed a way to verify friend or foe.

  He wondered why they didn't have such systems already. If there was some sort of a gentleman's agreement to leave the other fellow's bugs alone they neglected to tell him.

  * * *

  "These so called twelve hours shifts are just killing me," Alice complained.

  "Uh huh. More like sixteen hours if you count having to do things in the middle of your off shift and don't cut corners on something," Deloris agreed.

  "You don't want me to cut corners on environmental," Alice said with no humor. "We're all very fond of breathing. If we get very far out of balance it gets hard to bring it back. You can only allow so much carbon dioxide, and we can only remove it so fast. In theory it can run out of the optimum range in only four hours. If it gets too far out of whack you have to purge, which loses nitrogen. We only have so much liquid nitrogen so I preserve every gram I can. I keep checking my phone off shift. The computer is supposed to tell me if it sees a bad trend start, but I don't trust it. What if it fails in a mode we didn't predict? I've been getting up in the middle of the night and doing a quick visual of the gas numbers in graph form just to feel safe."

  "The bridge watch should check the gross numbers a couple times a night when they know we are sleeping," Barak said.

  Alice just made a disgusted little snort. That for trusting the bridge she implied.

  Deloris lifted her index finger and made a wiggling motion. That was their agreed signal to indicate she was going to helmet talk or suit talk as some called it. They'd found what they were pretty sure was a tiny microphone while cleaning, and they watched what they said about the captain and XO of the Yuki-onna much closer since then. Barak had a richer vocabulary in helmet talk because April's grandfather had taught him the finer nuances if it. It was a kind of sign language but all facial gestures because it grew from construction workers needing to talk privately when their suit transmissions were monitored. Deloris already knew some and Barak expanded it for her. Alice knew none of it but learned quickly. She also brought finger spelling to the mix for those difficult words for which they had no facial signs.

  "When we get back I'm going to just pig-out on a huge cheeseburger and fries," Alice started. She had a bunch of variations on this theme. One of them always spoke when the others helmet talked so the silence itself was not incriminating. If there was more than the one bug the command crew probably got really sick of hearing the same monologue about cheeseburgers or other 'when we get home' themes. They were pretty sure there weren't any cameras. They all looked very thoroughly for any lens or pinhole. But a microphone could be stuck on the other side of a bulkhead totally invisible.

  Deloris signed to him with feeling: "If you think our Captain and XO do their twelve hour shifts with no private time in the overlap you are nuts. They are too busy finding extra time for each other to trust them to double check us. No more than Captain Jaabir watched you guys working outside enough to see Harold wasn't following procedure or abusing the equipment." She had to finger spell some of it.

  Barak nodded in agreement, and helmet spoke: "Point well taken. He absolutely screwed up there and he may lose his ticket when we get back home."

  "Not however if he can find a way to blame it on you or raise a bigger issue like recording us and after artistic editing make our complaints into actual mutiny!" Deloris finished with a flourish.

  Barak nodded again that she was right, but went back to voice.

  "Alice, what exactly happens if we get the gas ratios get messed up too bad?"

  "The trouble is our CO² process is not continuous," Alice said. She was cute when she went into lecture mode, because it was like a different person speaking. Even her voice changed. "If we were a big habitat with all the room and power to spare we would have a steady state system. What we have for the Yuki-onna are two batch systems that extract CO² and then have to be switched over and be regenerated. They remove it more effectively after regenerating so you reduce the flow when fresh and then increase it as the absorbent is saturated.

  "You have an emergency canister that can strip the whole ship – once. And you have one extra sealed filter for the batch systems in case one stops working. They can be polluted or physically damaged. So you have to watch when one is started that it is working. If it isn't you only have so much time to swap filters or cycle back to the other unit before it is fully recharged. You can switch back and forth faster if need be until you can slowly stretch the cycle out to normal duration."

  "So what would we do if we had a huge problem and lost a lot of our nitrogen? Say we had a hole or a blowout that dumped a big section?" Barak asked Alice.

  "In theory we can run any nitrogen/oxygen ratio, right down to pure oxygen as long as the partial pressure is acceptable. In reality I'd be scared spitless to run pure oxy. There are too many minor components that were not designed for that. Even just our personal things would be a danger. You don't want to wear cotton in straight oxygen, it's a fire hazard. You don't want to pop a can of self-heating food in pure oxygen either. Not even at reduced pressure. It's toxic for long periods too. You'd be showing signs of damage by the time we got home if it was more than a couple weeks. And the drugs for zero G make it worse instead of better. We don't have any source of noble gasses to substitute for the nitrogen."

  "What's OK," Deloris assured her with an evil grin. "We could just use hydrogen from when we generate the oxygen to mix with it. It's low density so it would probably make our voices sound funny just like helium!"

  Alice looked horrified at the idea. "Yes, it would make my voice a terrified squeak, knowing I'm in an explosive atmosphere."

  "One assumes all the ship switches are sealed and explosion proof," Barak said. "I'm not so sure about our private computers and pads. If anybody ever tried that in desperation I'd suggest running the humidity right at a hundred percent. All it would take would be one static spark from sliding off your bunk to ignite it. Better to have condensation dripping down the bulkheads."

  "You'd have to be crazy to try," Alice said.

  "I bet in twenty years people will look back and say we were crazy to take this pile of junk out to Jupiter," Barak told them.

  "Maybe not crazy, but adventuresome?" Alice said.

  "Have you seen the Apollo vehicles?" Barak asked.

  "Dear God yes, and the Space Shuttles, those flying tributes to a brick outhouse!" Alice said.

  "Would you fly one of those?" he asked.

  "Not even at gunpoint," Alice agreed. "Just go ahead and shoot me and let it be quick."

  "See? It's all a matter of perspective," Barak insisted.

  Chapter 6

  April was studying for her third year Japanese class. She wondered if she'd ever be proficient without going to live in Japan for awhile. Japan after all was not North America, where she'd had such a bad experience before when she went down to Earth. That's what she kept telling herself but it still wasn't how she felt. Unfortunately as she learned the language she was also learning things about Japanese culture she didn't like. Much the same as she felt about North America now. Enough in either case to put her off
visiting. She loved visiting Earth. It was the people who made it a problem. That made her feel a little guilty, Japan had helped them during the war. She wondered if she'd be really comfortable again anywhere on Earth that wasn't wilderness. Her com signal overrode her lesson. Not many people could get past the filter.

  "Pull up the news for North America," Gunny told April. "There's some more odd stuff going on, and in London too. Look for stories or do a search key words, Rome flight. I don't have time to follow it today. I have a meeting, but I thought you'd be interested."

  April didn't have to search for it. It was the lead story in the abbreviated raw feed.

  Rome flight diverted from Dulles International to Andrews Base. Statements from the base information officer say it has nothing to do with terrorism or a hazard from the aircraft. Rather the flight was ordered into isolation by the CDC and directed to a taxiway distant from the flight line. The aircraft is being serviced and passengers will be fed and but they are being kept on the aircraft. The Boeing 898 is being refueled so it can maintain cabin comfort.

  The next couple paragraphs were just 'blah, blah, blah, we don't really know any more' filler. So she looked for the London story.

  Stansted airport refused gating to a German flight originating in Rome earlier today. The New Berlin Service Embraer was turned back without passengers disembarking and none boarded for the planned turnaround. The CAA indicated all flights originating in Rome are interdicted until further notice.

  By the time April read that story the watch she'd placed on the first story was indicating an update.

  Italy has closed all commercial airports in the region of Lazio by order of the Servizio Sanitario Nazionale and WHO. On condition of anonymity an official of the City of Rome told EuroNews that the emergency causing the proclamation is an unexpectedly severe outbreak of influenza. Calls to various officials were unanswered and attempts to contact hospitals in the Rome area found heavy security turning away the press, normal visitors and non-emergency patients.

  That seemed an over-reaction, was April's first thought. Flu had been around like forever. How bad could it be? She'd had flu once before the war and felt miserable but never in danger. She'd never known anybody on Home to die of an infectious disease. But, wait a minute... she remembered the live interview with the churchman insisting the Pope was well that she'd seen. Could this be about the same thing? Maybe it was worth worrying about. She keyed in a search: deaths from influenza 2086. The answer shocked her.

  Maybe that was because so many really poor countries didn't have any health care worth counting as such. She ran the search again adding United States of North America + Italy. It was still disturbing. Even the low range estimates of flu related annual deaths were still in the thousands.

  She took a deep breath and tried to calmly consider it outside the unexpected shock. She really didn't know that much about medicine. None of her friends worked in medicine. She'd only spoken to the Doctor at the Home clinic, and only about her own problems. Even when she got shot in Hawaii on her visit to Earth she hadn't gone to the hospital. The wife of the couple she was staying with was a nurse and had treated the nasty bruise in her home. Without the moon-made armor jacket she'd been wearing she'd have been dead, not bruised.

  It was sort of overwhelming. She already felt stretched trying to learn about banking and economics, not to mention things like Japanese that were for her, not to make money necessarily. There was so much, entire fields of knowledge she hadn't touched yet. Medicine was important and she needed to learn more about it – eventually. If only to decide what sort of life extension work to have in the future. It was in constant flux. But one thing at a time.

  All she needed to know about now to understand the news report was a general outline of what influenza is and how it is harmful. She had a rough idea that a virus was a little packet of protein that took over human cells instead of being cells themselves like bacteria. The details about how many kinds there were and how they caused disease she didn't know in any detail at all.

  Her favorite search returned over a hundred million hits on the word going back to the... 1990s? She didn't need highly technical articles. No way she'd understand them without learning a whole lot she didn't have time to study. History, that was what she needed. Simplified and non-technical. They called that sort of simplified study popularized, didn't they? Popular histories of influenza – she keyed in. It still returned thousands. Books+popular-history+influenza – she added. That was better. It returned twelve hundred some in print or for download, one just last year.

  April frowned and chewed her lip. Should she get the latest, or one back closer to the source? Sometimes things became clearer with time, but her grandpa had warned her sometimes current opinion lost the context of events earlier observers knew better. One older title caught her eye, "The Great Influenza". That resonated with term The Great Depression she kept reading about in her economics studies. A click bought it.

  She realized how thoroughly engrossed she'd become when her stomach growled loudly. Very little made her ignore lunch time. The clock in the corner of her screen said she was a couple hours past her customary meal time and she briefly considered having a meal delivered, opting instead to take her pad and read in the cafeteria. The walk would do her good because she'd been sitting way too long.

  It was not only past her usual lunch time it was past the peak lunch time for everybody else. There were only three people in the cafeteria and whoever was serving today wasn't visible behind the counter. They were probably in the back prepping for supper and cleaning up from lunch. She just got a couple sandwiches and side dishes off the simple buffet bar they kept stocked at all hours.

  Gabriel the young man who Ruby used as a messenger, and for other things, had a full sized computer open near the coffee pots. He looked over the upright screen and after they made eye contact and April nodded a hello, he tipped his head in invitation. Why not? She didn't know him that well but Jeff said he worked for Chen now, so he was an ally, part of Jeff's intelligence gathering organization. April trusted Ruby's judgment in people too.

  She unloaded her tray over on his side of the table looking back at the serving area. She hesitated. Gabriel might not have expected her to sit beside him where she could see his screen.

  "Do you need privacy?" April asked before sitting. "I could sit on the other side. You might have expected that."

  "Miss Lewis, I'm doing some analysis for Chen. I was told very clearly you are one of the principals receiving our work, so certainly nothing I do is a secret from you."

  "Fine," April said, sitting but leaving the empty tray beside her. "Just call me April. I'm looking into something odd too. I got so wrapped up in it I forgot to eat."

  "Do you need some help?" Gabriel offered

  "No, I don't mean to pull you off what you are doing," April said, still in apology mode. "It's probably important. I had Gunny point out some odd happenings this morning and got captivated by it. The district around Rome has such a bad early outbreak of influenza that they shut down all the airports and they turned away some flights in North America and the UK. It's early in the season for flu and it's been a long time since there was a bad outbreak or a nasty new variety of flu. I couldn't find any recent times they shut down flights.

  "I downloaded a historic book on the really bad epidemic of flu last century. The one in 1918. It's sort of hard understanding how it affected them. It was like a different world. They didn't have life support gear like now or antibiotics to fight secondary infections. If you got pneumonia after the flu it could kill you just as easily. But they also didn't have the ways to spread it we have now."

  "What's all that much different now?" Gabriel asked, frowning.

  "Faster transportation and more of it. The flu spread by ship movements at the end of World War I, especially troop ships. Even inside a country they spread it by rail. There wasn't any commercial air transport or many automobiles yet, and the roads out between towns
were horrible.

  "It's hard for me to picture some of the stories. It was so different. One town put armed men on the train platform and wouldn't let anybody off at their town. Some people living on an island sank a ship in the channel into their only harbor. Some desperate people managed to avoid it like that. I need to finish reading it but I was starved."

  "Have you gone back and checked your news stories for updates? Or have you just been reading for hours? Gabriel asked.

  "I was engrossed. How much can happen in a couple hours?" April asked him.

  "I don't know but I'm going to check."

  "Am I going to get you in trouble with Chen?" April worried.

  "Chen trusts me to follow any promising line of research I happen on," Gabriel said. "And I'll tell you something else. He once told me he never has researched anything for you, but what he didn't find out six other things he had no idea he needed to know."

  "That's good. I thought I was just a pain in the butt," April said, embarrassed.

  "Let's see what else is happening," Gabriel suggested, ignoring the self disparaging remark. "If enough people are sick it will show up elsewhere."

  "Canceled events?" April suggested.

  Gabriel nodded. "Yes, good idea, there will have to be announcements, but what kind?"

  "I'd have no idea. I'll ask Gunny right now. He's lived down there. Watch over my shoulder if you want. Do you have time for a quick question?" April asked him on com.

  "Always for you," Gunny said.

  April presented their idea and asked if Earth events wouldn't see cancelations in an epidemic?

  "I should have thought of that!" Gunny said right away.