April 6: And What Goes Around

by Mackey Chandler

  What could she say to that? There was no way she could criticize Jon's skills. In fact she'd never expected him to offer his valuable time.

  "That... is entirely acceptable," April admitted. "If I should happen to use Margaret, I know she has wanted the reflex improving gene mod Dr. Ames offers. Please tell her I'll drop a message on him that I'll cover the cost and she can go get it any time you will allow her."

  "Why does she need my permission?" Jon asked her suspiciously.

  "It's one of those minor mods he administers by viral carrier. She'll have to be isolated for two or three days. But it's well worth doing. It benefits your department too."

  "But you aren't offering it to Theo or me?" He held up a hand quickly to stop her from answering and added – "I'm not objecting or begging. I just find it curious."

  "I don't have enough money to offer it to all my friends. Besides, I can't imagine you being more dangerous. From what I've seen when we've worked out you are pretty fast already. Anything you lack in speed you make up for by thinking ahead and controlling the situation so you don't need speed. Theo... I'm not sure how old Theo is," April admitted, "but I have never seen such a thorough collection of nasty skill at inflicting violence on other humans. She always seems to have things about her person I didn't even recognize as weapons until she informs me how you use them. I've never had anybody else tell me stories that I had to get out of my mind before I could go eat again."

  "I know what you mean," Jon admitted. "She had a Middle Eastern fellow who had beaten his wife and threatened to kill her cuffed by her desk. He called her a very nasty slur as a woman and she unlocked him took him in the restroom. He was easily twice her size and she had a prolonged discussion about it in there... Just him and her and a piece of plastic hose full of lead shot. I was new to the job and all my other people stopped me from rushing in and rescuing her. He never gave us any trouble again."

  April knew about that incident but could see Jon was repeating the story for Gunny.

  "The old lady who brought us coffee and looks like somebody's grandma?" Gunny asked shocked.

  "The old lady who can walk a drunk beam rat in just by taking control of his thumb and pinching nerves I never knew existed," Jon told him. "I saw one get combative with her and she dropped him straight to his knees and made him cry like a baby."

  "I guess there is something to be said for experience," Gunny admitted.

  "I think we know which way things are going now," April summed up their research. "If anything comes in really significant, something we need to react to right away, we'll text or call each other right away, OK?"

  "That's fine with me," Jon agreed. "Does that mean you're kicking me out?" He asked April.

  "Not at all. It just means I think we're all burned out on trying to skim through all this feed," she said waving at the screen. "We need to set up some better filters now based on what we've seen and expect to happen and change how we're working. Right now I'd like us to stop and have some more of those sandwiches you brought. I have some pasta salad in the frige and I'll make a fresh pot of coffee."

  "Ah, OK. That sounds good. I can use a break," Jon agreed.

  * * *

  Irwin Hall leaned back in his chair and stretched. The chair sensed what he was doing when he kept pushing past a certain point, straightening out for him, and then went back to the semi-reclining position he'd set as a base earlier when he relaxed. In normal mode it slowly changed shape within a certain envelope and raised ridges in alternating areas to make sure he didn't go numb or get blood clots from sitting too long. Usually he wasn't aware of it moving. It did so fairly slowly and he was so used to it he didn't think about its gentle nudges anymore.

  It had been a long terrible day and he'd really needed the chair, although he had gotten up and walked a few times to use the restroom or go in the vault, he hadn't taken the time to walk to lunch or supper. The cafeteria was a three minute stroll away, but he'd had lunch couriered to his desk and forgone supper completely. He wasn't usually so compulsive about his work. Indeed he normally didn't approve of people who failed to balance their life with reasonable hours. He didn't intend to make a habit of it.

  It's just that today necessity forced it upon him because the markets on Earth below were in turmoil. Prices of equities and bonds, currencies and commodities had see-sawed the last month as people with wealth frantically tried to find a safe harbor for their money. But today had been a general rout. Jeff Singh of the System Trade Bank had called him mid-day warning him about some currency changes. He'd already been at his desk six hours trying to save what he could. This crash was damaging not just to small investors but central banks and even governments. Irwin was of the opinion it was mostly futile to try to avoid damage with everything already in free fall. The time to be thinking about safety had been a year ago, or maybe even two years.

  Nevertheless, he had a fiduciary responsibility to his customers. The Private Bank of Home had customers on every continent and he'd discharged his duty to them as well as he could. The financial markets of the Earth never closed but they did peak in activity following the sun. Computers never slept but human traders still had a hand in the market and they only functioned so many hours a day. He'd followed the trading from Moscow to Europe and London to New York and the Caribbean. Then across the Pacific's tax haven islands and Sydney to Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. Far too many hours for one man. It didn't matter what happened tomorrow because he would be sleeping and didn't expect to get up and be ready to do business again for a good twelve hours. He was tired beyond continuing.

  It was dark in the bank. Just one spot light set to a low intensity above his desk. Enough to let him find things on his desk and cut the contrast of his monitors to the dark room. He hadn't wanted somebody seeing the office brightly lit up off shift and thinking they were open for business. It was deep into the off shift, almost to the time he'd normally be getting up instead of going home to bed.

  Irwin cracked his neck both ways, shut the monitors down, reclined the seat a bit further and sat still, hands in his lap and head still full of all the trades and transfers he's crammed in the last few hours. If he wasn't careful he'd go to sleep right here until his employees came in and woke him up. Which wasn't all that far away now. He looked past his monitors at the glass wall with the bank name in gold letters and the corridor beyond. It was bright out there any shift, day or night. He'd been staring at the screen so long it was hard to refocus in the distance.

  The view was what he saw every day. It was etched in his brain. But even in his fatigued state something was different. He couldn't place what was different, but it was. He sat there frowning, then it became obvious. There was a little box, close to the color of the corridor wall itself that hadn't been there, well, recently he was sure. As tired as he was he might not have figured it out, but it moved. Creeping along the wall horizontally towards the cafeteria, until he sat up in shock and it froze at his motion. That really got his attention. This time he sat unmoving on purpose. After about a minute the little object resumed its journey. Irwin just watched until it passed out of his sight, not wanting to trigger it again. However it was programmed, he didn't want to it to have any conditioning or altered responses about his bank.

  He really wanted to go home and sleep, but that was out of the question now. He turned the monitor back on and called station security. He expected to get a duty officer and have to rouse Jon from his bed. Instead he answered the call himself. Looking at his unwrinkled shirt and clear eyes Irwin was pretty sure he was in the office early, not coming off an all-nighter like he was.

  "Irwin! He said cheerfully. "You know... you look like hell, guy?"

  "I love you too," Irwin responded.

  "Yet you never send flowers," Jon quipped.

  "Jon. I've been up twenty six hours. I just watched the farce that they label an economy below us melt down like it hasn't in three score and ten years. I'm not in a mood to banter. Now either I'm hallucin
ating, which isn't outside the realm of possibility, or I just saw something that is an important enough security breach to delay going to bed to tell you."

  "Indeed? Does it involve the bank?"

  "I don't know... " Irwin thought about it a little. He was tired. It took him a minute to think and Jon waited patiently. "I don't think so, but I can't be a hundred percent certain. Do you have, uh, sensors out in the corridors?" he asked Jon.

  "That isn't something I generally discuss with people."

  Irwin let out a frustrated sigh. "Jon, I'm the fellow on this corridor who has cash and gold bars in my vault. Do you think I'm trying to do a social crack of your security so I can break in Zack's place and steal his chocolate chip cookies?"

  "Ummm, point taken. I have some sensors, but you shouldn't be able to tell they're there. They are passive."

  "You don't have a little box with vent slots in the edges," Irwin asked, holding up index fingers and thumbs to define a rectangle a bit bigger than his wallet, "that crawls along the wall but freezes if it sees any motion around it?"

  He definitely had Jon's attention. "I'd agree you are hallucinating, but I can't imagine you hallucinating anything so strange. How does it hang on? Little suction cups?"

  "How would I know?" Irwin asked, really irked. "Something underneath it. How does a bug walk along the wall? Maybe it has little tracks like a tank with sticky pads. What does it matter? The question is what is it doing?"

  "Sorry. I don't have anything that moves around. Nobody else should either. I just got caught up in the details. I don't like this," Jon decided.

  "Well it doesn't thrill me either. I have no idea how long the damn creepy thing was hanging there watching me," Irwin said.

  "Could it have been reading your monitor?" Jon speculated.

  "We're not that stupid. None of our monitors can be seen from the corridor windows. They are all shielded electronically and we even made sure there aren't any reflective surfaces behind us off which to read the screen. It did move on after I shut down though," Irwin remembered.

  "It's not there anymore?" Jon asked, worried.

  "No, I sat still so I didn't trigger it again and it continued on toward the cafeteria. At the rate it was going it will take eight or ten minutes to get there. Well, half that now, since we've been talking. Are you going to do anything about it?" Irwin asked.

  "Yeah, I'm texting one of my people even as we speak," Jon said. "He'll walk past it and get a good look at it. They'll record it with security spex. Then I'll probably set up some instruments for it to go past and get a really good scan of it. Maybe backscatter analyze it from the other side of a bulkhead and see if it emits any radio traffic in the next day."

  "Why not just have somebody scoop it off the wall into a Faraday cage or smack it with a four kilo engineer's hammer?" Irwin demanded.

  "That might not be smart. The size you indicated, it could have a hunk of explosive in it the size of a deck of playing cards. You'd be astonished how much BOOM a hunk of third generation metallic explosives that size can make. If it is remotely operated they'd see you putting the box over it and have time to trigger a self destruct. Even if it doesn't go boom big I don't want a hunk of fused scrap that won't tell us who was using it. I've got to have a survey done, quickly, and see if we have any more of these crawling around Home," Jon told Irwin.

  "Oh... I didn't think of that. I thought one was bad. Crap... "

  "I might set up an ambush and hit it with an EMP. If there are others it might just look like a failure to them. And they'd keep operating any others." Jon said.

  "Why would you want that? What possible benefit to allow somebody to keep spying on us?" Irwin asked.

  "Well, if it is spying and we can figure out what sort of data it is returning we can feed it false information. But if it isn't a spy device, then yeah, we can neutralize them all at once." Jon agreed.

  "What could it be but a spy device?" Irwin asked irritated. He was tired. Jon didn't take offence.

  "It could be a private project by some kid who doesn't know how much it would alarm us. I know several teenage kids who have the technical skills to make something like this but lack the wisdom to see what a bad idea it would be. Or... it could be a small combat robot. An assassination machine." Jon speculated. "It may be searching for a face and waiting to get within range. Or even have a list with priorities assigned."

  "I was going to walk past it, home," Irwin said. He seemed to be having second thoughts.

  "Perhaps you should take the long way around the ring today," Jon suggested, "go to a different elevator."

  "I can't imagine anybody would want to hurt me," Irwin said. But he didn't sound at all confident.

  "You must live the life of the pure and righteous," Jon said. "I know lots of people who would like me dead. The hard part would be narrowing the list down. You do deal in large sums of money. People aren't always rational. If one of your customers lost money they may blame you. Even if you did exactly as they instructed you. The human mind has a vast capacity for refusing blame and transferring responsibility to others."

  "But most of my customers who lost serious money lost it in the last day. Surely this has been here longer than that. I think it's been about thirty hours since the last shuttle docked on Home," Irwin said.

  "Don't bet your life on it. Walk around the long way," Jon insisted.

  Irwin nodded a yes. So tired he could barely hold his eyes open.

  "Call me after you sleep and are up and functioning," Jon invited. "I should know something by then," he said, and disconnected.

  * * *

  Barak sat and stewed wondering what was happening for a long time after being sent to his cabin. Nobody sent him a message and it was hours before Deloris finally came back to him. She was clean with fresh clothes and wet hair, so she'd stopped at her own place and cleaned up. Alice was similarly cleaned up and now he was paranoid enough to wonder if they had been together discussing the situation before talking to him. He couldn't blame either of them if they didn't want to get sucked into his problems. At least they were here. No reason they couldn't have just decided he was too toxic to continue associating with on their own time.

  "I'm confined to my cabin by order of the acting Captain," Barak told them right up front.

  "Yeah, she told us. If she intended for us to stay away she forgot to actually order us," Deloris said.

  "How bad was the fire?" Barak wanted to know.

  "It didn't really damage any part of the ship. It discolored a bit of deck and a shelf above, but it was basically confined to a few self heating meals in a shrink wrap block," Alice told him.

  "We didn't lose too much air like we were talking about?" Barak asked.

  "Not enough reserve nitrogen to matter," Alice said. "The cupboard is just a place to hold the next few days food. You have the main stores in three separate locations for security. It was planned we could lose one of the three and make it home, although we might lose a few kilos and meals could be a little boring. It's not even that bad, now that we are short crewed.

  "We lost about a dozen cans total of beef stew, lasagna, and chicken teriyaki. The other stuff just needs wiped off to remove some smoke film. As soon as I vented the room it stopped the cans from heating. We only lost about two cubic meters of air."

  "Do you know how it started?" Barak noticed he was the only one asking questions, so Alice must have run through all this for Deloris already.

  "Oh sure. I can even tell you which can. It had a nice ding on the bottom edge. Somebody got rough with the block of meals and smacked it on the deck hard enough to actuate one. In fact the little recessed dimple on the bottom you need to pop in to start it heating on purpose was still unmarked. It's the same kind of banging stuff around that killed Harold really."

  "Well, about that... Charlotte says she and Jaabir think I somehow killed Harold and they just haven't proved it yet," Barak revealed.

  The women looked at each other not even trying to h
ide their shock. Apparently Charlotte had not intimated that little gem to either of the woman. That was just more proof to Barak she didn't really believe it herself or she'd have feel obligated to warn them he was a danger.

  "That's crazy! You were in the lock. Do they think you stayed behind every day and beat his boot flanges with a hammer until they cracked?" Alice asked.

  "She informed me my suit recording were erased, and they find that very suspicious." He switched to helmet talk. "But I have copies of them."

  "I don't believe it. Every time you plug your suit systems in to recharge it dumps your data log to the ship's computer. And they get the camera stream from your suit to view on the bridge. You mean to tell me they don't record that stream too? They would want it recorded just in case you don't make it back to plug in. If your shift log was missing they'd have been complaining about it back then, before the next shift certainly, not now," Deloris said.

  Alice meanwhile wiggled her finger and said in helmet talk – "Get them. We'll make more copies and hide them," while Deloris talked.

  "I think I'd just like to watch a movie and not have to think about this awhile," Barak said. He signed – "I want you guys to hear my conversation with Charlotte."

  They both nodded agreement.

  "I have one on my list I wanted to see about old open cockpit airplanes. Is that light-hearted enough to de-stress you?" Deloris asked.

  They both agreed. They turned up the volume and the ladies listened to his encounter with headphones while the movie played to explain the lack of conversation.

  They all had simple vocabularies in helmet talk and had to finger spell a lot of things. Deloris knew this was going to take far too long that way so she made sure her private pad wasn't connected and typed the message on screen. She'd hard delete it when done.

  "She messed up telling you she would give you your hearing. That little fit of temper is going to come back on her. I've read the regulations repeatedly, they are important to know, and I can assure you it is within her authority to call a disciplinary hearing as acting Captain on an extended voyage. It would never fly on say a six hour orbit to orbit, but this authority was decided before the Mars missions left. Then she admitted flat out she could not prove you hit Jaabir. Stupid, stupid thing to do. She exonerated you. I doubt she even realizes it. And the licensing body doesn't allow a second hearing on the same issue, so your ticket as an able spacer and extra-vehicular specialist is safe."