3rd World Products, Book 17

by Ed Howdershelt

  I said, “Thanks, Tea,” and left the door open when headed back into the house past Marie. As I rinsed my mug, I heard the front door close, then heard two soft paces that put Marie in the alcove archway.

  She asked, “Got another cup?”

  Reaching into a cabinet, I chose a big tan mug from an Iowa regional blood bank and set it on the counter by the instant coffee jar. Producing a clean spoon from a drawer, I set it in the mug.

  As I spooned coffee into my mug, Marie came to stand in front of the jar and asked, “Is instant all you have?”

  Opening another cabinet, I lifted down a box of tea-bag type coffee packets and said, “Nope. Got these.”

  Her gaze narrowed and her lips tightened, then she said, “They’re the same kind Tanya uses.”

  I added hot water and stirred as I replied, “They’re also the kind Angie and Lori use. Tanya never came into this house.”

  Taking a bag out of the box, Marie dropped it into her cup and poured hot water over it as she asked, “Why not?”

  “We spent most of our time on the flitter, trying to figure out how to get you treated without going to prison.” With a grin, I added, “She was willing, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want you to think less of me.”

  Giving me a fisheye, Marie archly asked, “Think less of you?”

  Pretending thoughtfulness, I shrugged. “Yeah, you’re right. You hated me, so that would have been pretty tough, wouldn’t it? Let’s just say I didn’t want you to think I’d lost my touch.”

  Rolling her eyes, Marie chuckled, “Your touch?”

  “Yeah. You know; getting the job done without getting caught. Dodging the Stasi and all that.”

  Marie occupied herself for a time by using her spoon to massage and stir her coffee-teabag. Without looking up from her efforts, she softly said, “We were damned good at that, weren’t we?”

  “Yup.”

  “We never lost a client. Not one.”

  “Nope. Not one.”

  Spoon-squeezing the bag a few more times, she chuckled and asked, “Remember Marienwald?”

  “Let’s see… Dead of winter, seven people, a truck that quit with sixteen klicks to go, and half a company of Stasi searching the town and woods for us. That Marienwald, ma’am?”

  She chuckled again. “Yeah. That one.”

  “As I recall, you sort of borrowed a truck from the Stasi and scared the hell out of our clients by showing up in a uniform.”

  Marie laughed, “And you baited the Stasi into blocking and searching two streets north of the one we used.”

  I shrugged. “Sure. Had to. We needed the river road.”

  She shuddered. “The water came all the way up to the damned windows, Ed. It was a foot deep inside the truck. I was almost sure we’d have to swim for it.”

  “It splashed your windows a bit, that’s all. Back where I was, it never got higher than the tailgate.”

  With another shudder, Marie test-sipped her coffee, then put the bag in the sink and turned to face me. “Bullshit,” she said, “You were soaking wet when we finally stopped.”

  “Yup. The tailgate — on a truck that you picked out for us — leaked. Leaked real bad, in fact. The back end was full of water and I got knocked flat when we climbed up out of the river. Damned near got washed out of the truck. Tell you what, ma’am; I was never as happy as when we finally got that fire going. Next time you can bait the Stasi and I’ll pick the getaway truck.”

  That made her laugh again. “Yeah, sure. The Forestampt thought their woods were on fire in the middle of the night. They got there before anyone else. There had to be half a dozen fire trucks.”

  The moment of shared humor faded slowly, but fade it did. After a time Marie looked at me over the rim of her cup as she sipped, then said, “I still have a big problem about Tanya, Ed.”

  I shrugged. “Try to ignore my sighs of deep and devastating disappointment, ma’am.”

  She grinningly snorted, “Oh, fuck you and your disappointment. You don’t really care at all.”

  “Nah, guess not. It isn’t something I can fix. Stay or go, Marie. It’s all up to you.”

  Regarding me for a time, she set her cup on the counter and looked around the house, then looked at me.

  “Show me the guest room.”

  I noddingly indicated the other end of the house and said, “End of the hall on the left. Bathroom’s on the right.”

  “Where’s the master bedroom?”

  “To the right of the bathroom.”

  She canted her head and eyed me briefly again, then headed down the hall to the guest room. A few moments later she came out of the guest room and went into the bathroom. The door closed.

  I called up a screen to check email and messages as I headed for the back porch. Leaving the glass door open, I took a seat in a lawn chair outside the screen porch. Hm. A string of messages from a new spammer. I tagged them all and checked one from Ginny Harrington.

  My name was on a list in her message and all the recipients of the message were visible. She asked if I’d already registered for her group’s weekend charity ride. A pressure tactic. Ginny knows I don’t do group rides, but she’s a presumptuous status-seeking organizer.

  I used a probe to locate her computer — a rather fancy laptop — and removed my name and email addy from her various lists, then dug into her contact lists. I let Galatea fish up and delete mentions of me from the hundred or so machines involved in some manner with Ginny’s, then deleted her initial message.

  As I’d done all that, Marie had come to stand some feet behind me. I waved over my shoulder and opened the next message. Marie went back into the house, then returned to the porch. Taking a seat on the other side of the table, she set her coffee cup down and looked around.

  “Ed,” she said, and I looked up at her.

  “Here. Present. Yo.”

  “Was… Was your friend Angie serious about hiring me?”

  “I’d say so. She doesn’t waste her time or anyone else’s.”

  After a pause, Marie said, “I’ve been gone from it all for so long.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, you’re my age, and you’ve been out of the business so long, and things have changed so much, and it’ll be like starting from scratch, and…”

  She quietly snorted, “Shut up, dammit.”

  “Oh, yes’m. By your command, ma’am.”

  “Well?! How would you feel?!”

  Letting my screen dissipate, I said, “Gee, lady, I dunno. One day a big-assed spaceship parked over the Gulf. I was offered a job shepherding an alien woman who wasn’t really all that alien. The job was offered to me by a woman I hadn’t heard from since the seventies. They replaced a chunk of her spine and I was given a flitter and a dose of ‘bots.”

  Sipping my coffee, I said, “Unlike you, I didn’t need to be repaired before I was hired. I’d been out of the spook biz for twenty years and out of the mercenary biz for ten years. If I hadn’t been working directly for Linda, I’d have been working for people half my age, but I wouldn’t have let that stop me. Retirement sucks. I was bored shitless. A shiny new adventure popped up and I damned well jumped on it. Now it’s your turn to jump on one. Or not, I suppose, if you think you have something better to do.”

  Marie sat there almost like a chastised child for a moment, then took a breath and sighed it out. The end of the sigh became a soft chuckle that ended with, “Now I know why I came here.”

  Grinning, I asked, “Y’weren’t just hot for me, huh?”

  Snorting a laugh, she shook her head. “No.”

  Snapping my fingers in a ‘drat’ gesture, I muttered, “Damn.”

  That got me another laugh. Marie’s entire demeanor seemed to change almost instantly. She relaxed in her chair and took another deep breath, exhaling it in what looked like a measure of relief.

  She asked, “So you think I’m still up to it?” Holding up a hand, she added, “And you know I mean working for 3rd World.”

  “No, of cour
se not. You’ve been out too long. But you’re as good as forty again, so you can get back up to it fast.”

  Sipping her coffee, Marie said, “Not too long ago, there was a time I’d never have had any doubts.”

  I shrugged. “Your last few years would have kicked the shit out of anyone, Marie. Get back in the saddle and see how you feel a year from now. Hell, even just three months from now.”

  “What’ll she have me doing?”

  “Damned if I know. Saving the world, I guess.”

  “Uh, huh. So why’d you retire? Why, really?”

  “Same reason as Linda. The company changed too much.”

  “She won’t talk about it much. Will you?”

  I considered that. There was no real reason not to tell her, except that I didn’t feel like talking about it. On the other hand, talking about it would give her a reason to stick around while she made up her mind about something else… if she hadn’t already.

  “Sure,” I said, then I told her how and why I felt 3rd World’s corporate conscience had apparently become vulnerable to political and business pressures.

  Sipping coffee, I added, “Linda cited some of the same instances. She said it was too much like working for the government.”

  Marie grinned and chuckled, “Well, I’m sure you took that as complete validation for leaving.”

  I met her gaze for a moment, then said, “Yup. I only caught the peripheral crap that individually concerned me. As the company’s top cop, she was smack in the middle of all of it.”

  Holding my gaze for another moment, Marie nodded slightly and said, “Got it. No joking about Linda with Ed.”

  With a mental sigh, I said, “No deliberate misinterpretations. No misdirections. Where’d that ‘validation’ crack come from?”

  “I just wanted to see if you were really still you.”

  “You had some reason to think I wasn’t?”

  Sitting up and resting her arms on the table, Marie said, “Just the opposite, really. Tanya told me a long story about how you set things up to sneak a piece of me out for treatment.” She made a little moue-shrug and added, “And how you got the piece of me back into me. She said the job was done before she suddenly realized you’d been putting the whole scheme together on the fly.”

  “As ever. Pick up pieces as you go. Put them together if you can.”

  She nodded and sipped her coffee, then stood up and stretched. Looking down at me, she said, “I think I’ll head home now.”

  Well damn. Oh, well. I stood up wondering if she’d want more than a handshake. Her right fist seemingly came out of nowhere at close to light speed and I instinctively ducked back and down as my protective field snapped on.

  Marie’s knuckles stopped just short of where my face had been, not even contacting the p-field. She dropped her arm and said, “No harm, no foul. That was for screwing my daughter, Ed. I’ll have your thousand when you show up tomorrow.”

  With that, she mounted her board and soared out of my yard. I sat down, put my feet up on her chair, put up a screen, and continued checking email. Sure enough, I soon felt a generic field presence approaching from above and behind me.

  Sending a probe showed me Marie hovering twenty feet or so above the house. Poking a couple of new spams away, I cleared the screen. Stretching it to four feet wide, I had it display ‘Hello Marie‘ in large, glowing red letters and sat back to sip coffee. The field presence behind me moved northeastward until it faded with distance.

  I finished the emails and message boards and sat considering what I might want to teach Marie and what could be left for Tanya to teach her. I knew Marie; even though Tanya had been hauling her around for months, she’d consider her daughter to be a second-hand — and therefore second-best — source of scooterboard info.

  Swilling the last of my coffee, I rose to make a fresh mug and sent a probe to locate Marie’s cell phone. It was in her left jeans pocket, 2200 feet above northeast Ocala. Using the probe for a look around, I found Tanya flying inverted through the last half of a roll. She banked hard and zipped back to Marie, stopping alongside her.

  “Well?” asked Tanya, “Now do you believe me?”

  “That doesn’t prove anything. Sure, you fly it pretty well, but I’m absolutely sure there are a few things he didn’t teach you and I want to know what they are.”

  Tanya snapped, “Mom, why the hell do you think he wouldn’t teach me everything about them?”

  Marie replied flatly, “Because I’ve known him a hell of a lot longer than you have. He always keeps something in reserve.”

  Uh, huh. Well, true enough as a rule. Marie and I had been trained to always keep some little something in reserve. But I hadn’t felt it necessary with scooterboard training, and she probably wouldn’t believe it.

  Was that a good thing or not? On one hand, it would encourage her to keep in contact… if I wanted that contact. On the other, it could turn her into something of a badger if she thought I was holding anything back.

  Angie’s ping sounded in my commo implant. I sent back two pings as a ‘wait’ signal, then called Athena. She answered and I asked her to listen in, then I answered Angie with, “Hi, Angie, what’s up?”

  “Oh, nothing much, I guess. Just some satellites and assorted junk gathering together over our heads. How about a screen?”

  Putting up a screen, I saw she was wearing a non-military blouse and jacket and said, “Woo! Sharp! Stepping out tonight?”

  “As it happens, yes, I am. What about that stuff upstairs?”

  “Well… Is there a problem, ma’am? Will it fall out of orbit or hit anything else up there?”

  Her left eyebrow arched as her head canted slightly in a studious expression. “Those who know don’t seem to think so.”

  “Then shoving it all together sounds like a damned good idea to me. It’ll be easier to track. Who’s doing it and how?”

  “I was thinking you could probably tell me.”

  “Uh, huh. Why’s that? Because Steph and I used to use that stuff for target practice?”

  “Among other things. So you’re saying you have nothing to do with what’s happening?”

  “Other than you, who wants to know? Officially, that is?”

  “Who else would I tell, you mean?”

  I shrugged. “Okay. Yeah. That.”

  “Right now, it’s just me asking. I got wind of it and figured you were up to something.”

  “In that case, you figured right. In a couple of months all the loose junk will be a couple of big wads of junk in a long elliptical orbit. Anything not on an active registry or capable of use or recovery will be part of one pile or the other.”

  After a long pause and with a flat gaze, Angie said, “Ed, this could cause a lot of trouble.”

  “From people who couldn’t and wouldn’t do anything about the mess up there? If so, I’d suggest we don’t tell them anything until it’s ready. Maybe they can make some use of it.”

  Her gaze narrowed. “Use it how?”

  “I’d kind of planned to melt it all and make a couple of big hollow donuts. Make ‘em spin and add hatches. Like that.”

  She nibbled her lip and seemed to consider things, then asked, “Then what?”

  Shrugging, I replied, “Then nothing. I don’t need a space station. Know anybody who might be able to use one? I’ll let ‘em go cheap.”

  Her narrow gaze returned. “How cheap?”

  “Oh, I dunno, ma’am; I might let one go in exchange for free tuition for anyone who can maintain a ‘B+’ average or better. And I guess the other could be had for a truly free health care program that doesn’t do more for politicians than patients.”

  Angie let her skepticism show with, “You’d only be asking for the damned moon, Ed.”

  “Yeah, I know… but speaking of the moon… maybe the stations could swing out far enough to put themselves within flitter range of the moon. Someone else can run the math for that idea, though. And we might need some new kind of flitter
for that job.”

  Angie’s gaze had turned a bit stark. After a moment, she said, “Um… Well, keep me posted, Ed. Please. I, ah… I have to go now. And don’t worry. I won’t say anything. Yet.”

  Heh. Yes, she would. You bet she would.

  With a little two-fingered salute, I said, “Good ‘nuff. It shouldn’t be a secret long, though. I’ll want some input later on useful designs. You know some people in the space business, right?”

  “Ah… yes. I do. Okay, then. Ah… later, Ed.”

  “Later, Fearless Leader Two.”

  She disconnected. Hm. Come to think of it, something like the spinning-wheel station in ‘2001: Space Odyssey‘ might be better. Maybe just a big disk? Near-normal fake gravity at the edges. They could outfit the interior later.

  Chapter Ten

  Athena said, “Angie seemed rather disturbed, Ed.”

  I chuckled, “Yeah, I thought so, too, ma’am.”

  Manifesting before me, Athena gave me an expression of sufferance as she said, “I thought you might venture an opinion about why she’d have been disturbed.”

  Trying to appear appropriately enlightened, I offered, “Ah. Okay. Being in the Air Force, she might have been a bit concerned about space junk collecting until I told her about making space stations.”

  “Elucidate, please.”

  “It’s simple, ma’am. She prob’ly thinks her outfit could have been doing that all along. Could a regular flitter computer handle the math and set things in motion?”

  “Of course, but that doesn’t explain why she seemed disturbed.”

  “Sure it does. She didn’t think of it first. And she works for both 3rd World, which is a for-profit company, and the US Air Force, which undoubtedly thinks it should have dominion over near-Earth space. I’m gathering junk to make space stations and she has to figure out how to let that info slip without appearing to play favorites.”

  Eyeing me for a moment, Athena remarked, “Her dilemma seems to entertain you.”

  “Heh. Yeah, maybe a little, I guess. But I’m going to take the matter out of her hands by having her call Lee Hines of NASA. I’ll ask if he can still put a crew together for a trip to the moon, then tell him about the stations and ask for ideas.”