April 4: A Different Perspective

by Mackey Chandler

  "Dollars are fine." Mackay swiped his com pad past the offered port and checked the total carefully. "A free word of advice," Mackay told the man mildly. "People on Home are different. There are very few sheep and victims to be found. I know a teenage boy on Home who has no military experience and you'd think he couldn't walk out to buy a sandwich without getting rolled, to look at him. The Chinese decided to steal one of his little space ships a month back. He dropped a fusion bomb on their spaceport rather than let them steal from him. Destroyed his ship and the main Chinese spaceport and most of a town of a million and a half people next to it. There's a crater there now five or six kilometers across. If they had not backed down, then I really worry how many more he would have send down on their heads," he explained.

  "If you mess with Home you aren't setting yourself up to avoid windows the rest of your life. You'd have to worry if they will find the house you are in and drop a Rod from God down the chimney, or if they know what neighborhood you are in, they might decide a ten-kiloton warhead is a sufficiently surgical strike. If you really, really, pissed them off, they might decide Lake Michigan needs new big Chicago Bay on the South end.

  "Why haven't I heard that about China?" Buscemi reasonably asked. "Something that big should have been in the news." He was much braver now that Mackay was talking and it seemed he wouldn't be shot out of hand.

  "I believe the Chinese found it embarrassing," Mackay explained. "If they publicly acknowledged it they lose face and all the more so if they are impotent to respond to it. Yet even those crazies are not stupid enough to find out how many quarter-billion megaton warheads they could absorb. I don't imagine the USNA wants that story on the news. It could make their people realize their leaders retain power only because the same teenage boy hasn't decided to give them the same treatment as China."

  "Yeah, yeah I can understand that. You look like you can't hold your territory, you're done."

  "Go back to your territory," Mackay advised him. "You know how things work there and fit in. You don't understand things up here."

  "You got the families here too," Buscemi objected.

  "Yeah and if I have to do business with them I'll ask Eddie The Lip Persico how to deal with them. They may be in the same line of business you are, but they are spacers too."

  "Persico! Why didn't you say you were connected to them?"

  "Because I'm not. But I'm Home, that's enough he would speak respectfully with me."

  Buscemi nodded, still uncertain of the full social dynamic. "OK, you and I, we're square, OK? We're quit of each other after today, capiche?"

  "Agreed. We're done here guys," he told his crew. The last through the door was Holt. He turned his back on them, but the black muzzles at his shoulders turned to the rear and tracked on the them until the last sliver of doorway was closed.

  Chapter 23

  "Mom, we need to show you how to use the patch kit," Eric insisted. "It's here in the com console and we had a really good demonstration on it in school today."

  "I'm glad for you, but I want to go to supper now. You can show me tomorrow when you're not in school."

  "Promise mom?" Lindsy asked. "Eric is right about this. It's really important. We'll be home with you tonight and tomorrow, but we really need to show you before we go back to school."

  Lindsy and Eric agreeing about something? Had cats and dogs formed a union? It was so strange she felt faintly threatened by it, like they might gang up on her.

  "Yes, I promise, we'll come back home after breakfast and you can have as much of the morning as you need to show me. Satisfied?"

  "Yes, thank you. We had the Head of Security in and he didn't just lecture. He had panels with leaky spots on them and we used real patches and tested them after we patched them."

  "Oh my. That that sounds intense. Was it intimidating having the top cop at school?"

  "Nah, he's really neat," Eric informed her. "He didn't act all stern with anybody. He's a whole lot less stuck up on his authority than my principal back home."

  "Did he wear a uniform and a badge and gun?"

  "He was just dressed in regular slacks and a dress shirt," Lindsy remembered. "No badge, I'd have remembered that." She scrunched her eyebrows up and thought on it. "He had one of those Tasers, not a regular pistol, but I'm so used to seeing them on everybody now, I didn't think anything about it at the time. He laughs a lot and real easily."

  "He went over to the cafeteria with all of us and had lunch," Eric piped up.

  "Did he have a lot of questions?" Linda asked warily.

  "No, he had a lot of answers," Lindsy laughed. "He left the chair across from him open so if you had any questions you could go ask him."

  "And I couldn't believe you had the nerve to ask that!" Eric said. For a miracle Lindsy didn't take offense at him, she just grinned devilishly.

  "What, pray tell, did you ask?" their mom worried.

  "She asked if he was really bald, or if he shaved his head every morning," Eric supplied.

  "That's a really personal thing to ask," her mom said, horrified.

  "I know. I wish I'd thought of it first," Eric admitted.

  * * *

  "I don't want the job," Everett Jones snarled at Hartug. "I do something actually useful. I keep these piece o' crap beer can rovers working. What of them we have left. If I try hard enough they get my friends back home alive. The administrators don't do anything satisfying and mostly sit around thinking too much and creating ways to interfere with the folks who are running things just fine."

  "But you have supervised before. It says in your folder you ran the whole maintenance system for the Baltimore bus system, with eighty-some mechanics and parts people."

  "Yes I did and it was a union shop and I couldn't fire a single worthless one of them."

  "You'd have that ability here. Granted it is an expensive decision to fire someone in Armstrong and pay the transport back, plus expenses to bring a new person in out of your budget, but are there really that many people here you need to get rid of? I can squeeze in two passengers when we lift, if you really have to send someone back. and as for your job, I know you have been training the kid working with you for over a year. Surely he has gained some proficiency, unless he is an incompetent you want to send back?"

  "No, he isn't half bad. Better than me at that age truth be known. Thing is, I expect the next ship back here will have a trained administrator to bump me anyway. I'll screw up my department that's running just fine right now and for what? I can't see you guys letting a guy keep running it that isn't a politician." The way he said that word was not complimentary.

  "The President told me to fix it. I have to leave somebody in charge. The professional politicians have given us nothing but grief. I don't even have a professional administrator left to choose. I will report back and be done with this matter, but I doubt anyone will be in a hurry to undo what I leave behind. There has been far too much career-ending drama attached to Armstrong, for administrative folks to want their names associated with it for awhile."

  "When would we get a replacement for me?"

  "I have a guy my staff recommends from Earth. By his file he was a gearhead as a kid, went in the Marines and worked on heavy equipment. Big Diesel mechanic, turbines, cranes, pumps, navigation, certified on twenty-seven vehicles. He'd love to be on the next ship up."

  "OK, you take Brad Berry back with you, replace him too and you have a deal."

  "The IT guy? What did he do to incur your wrath?"

  "Over a year back, we had a power glitch, there was smoke in the cable run. The electrician cut power, vented the cable run, suited up and crawled in to see what shorted. Brad comes in and is totally flipped out, screaming he has to have power. Wouldn't listen. He sees the lock out on the switching box, grabs a fire extinguisher and is trying to knock it off so he can restore power to his gods, the computers. I had to thump him against the wall pretty hard before he stopped trying. Hard enough he spent a couple days in the infirmary."


  "Didn't he know what that lock was? That there was an electrician in there working?"

  "He didn't care. He's in his own little world in there and as far as he is concerned Armstrong exists to let him run his computers, not the other way around. Turn his power off and he isn't rational. Next time I might not be there to stop him."

  "He goes," Hartug agreed, "that one goes back if he has to lay on the deck."

  "I'm going to shove all the repetitious stuff, that can be rubber stamped, off on my secretary. That will free up enough time I can help, if we have some maintenance that is seriously beyond the kid's skill level. I'm going to write up a rover repair and procedures manual, that I was never allowed time to write and I'm going to speak with every department head and ask them what they are required to do that's stupid make-work," he warned Hartug right up front.

  "We were required to fill out a daily job sheet, so the executive felt like he had control. But it was so detailed it took near an hour to write out. But you were not allowed to add – one hour filling out daily report – at the end of your shift report. All those hundreds of wasted man hours would have made the boss look bad. So it was inaccurate and stupid from day one. That ends."

  "So at least a full eighth of all man hours was wasted and then falsified to hide it?"

  "That's just the tip of the iceberg," Jones assured him. "We couldn't take a lunch break in work spaces – environmental rules you know? We idiots might spread tranny lube on our tuna fish or something. But we weren't allowed to show travel time to go to lunch, so add maybe a second hour travel time, shot for no real reason most days."

  "How did this place function?"

  "Poorly," Jones assured him. "Give me a year and I may whip it into shape."

  * * *

  "You're back early," April noted. Gunny said he'd be gone four days. She hadn't expected him back in two. "I kept a low profile just like you asked, but Eric Brockman seemed to be in the cafeteria every time I went. The one time he wasn't, Freidman was there. Did you sic him on to me?"

  "Why would I do that? and how would he know when you were headed to the cafeteria?" Gunny asked her. "He couldn't go do the job, he just had to be here, not to watch you."

  "I don't know," she said suspiciously, "I was starting to think you might have chipped me somehow, or put a spy cam in the corridor. How did your little gig with the security guys go? Were they OK to work with?"

  "The customer decided his security guys could handle it after all and terminated us early. We basically walked them to the hotel, slept over and were dismissed the next morning." He had no idea how Brockman had tracked her. He wasn't any slouch though.

  "You get shorted on pay then?" April immediately cut to the heart of the matter.

  "Oh no, Mackay wrote the contract for full pay on early termination. He insisted on it."

  April looked at him sharply. Something about the way he had said that…

  * * *

  "We have to go a little slower towing the road fusing rig, but it will cool and when we come back we'll fuse a parallel lane," Jeff explained. "When you drove out here last week and did seismic tests on the mountains, it bugged me to send a rover out so far for so little. I'll follow the survey flags just like you did, so this is the first lane of our west road. You see how easy the paver is to run. Got any questions on it?"

  "No, not until it messes up. If it fails, what is the likely mode?"

  "I have no idea. It hasn't malfunctioned yet. Likely if it does, it will just stop working at all. That should be kind of obvious. There won't be any new road in your mirror."

  "Why the herringbone pattern?"

  "Well the temperature swings will crack a huge monolithic sheet. Likely more toward the edges than the center. A laser melts some spikes in a grid that will stick down from the bottom of each block to locate it in the regolith, then it switches to microwaves and backs off the edge as it melts so there is a greater gap a couple inches down. If a section does fuse to the next, it will crack in the night along the weak line. But you want as small a gap on top as possible."

  "I figured that out, but why herringbone? Why not squares or rectangles or hexagons?"

  "You ever ride on a brick road down on Earth?"

  "No, I thought that was something out of "The Wizard of Oz"."

  "Not at all. Brick roads are real and very durable. Some of them are in fine condition after a couple hundred years. But when you drive on them and they are laid out perpendicular to your line of travel they hum, loudly. We are using tracked vehicles right now, but we plan to transition to wheels as soon as possible. With the herringbone pattern the tire crosses the crack on a diagonal. It is quieter and noise is lost energy so it is more efficient for the vehicle too."

  He stopped talking and watched the screen intently, he told the paver to stop with the rover and brought them to a stop. "Also there will be homes or businesses to each side of the road and the constant hum of vehicles passing could add up to be very annoying."

  "Why did you stop?"

  "Even with our front bumper, is directly over where you will be tunneling out the outer boundary ring," Jeff informed him. "I am putting a marker out with the distance from the center. It's like a Leaving Central sign or a City Limits sign."

  "I wouldn't do that," Mo urged him frowning. "It's giving away too much information. Your enemies could use it for targeting data."

  "You're too paranoid. The tunnel will be several kilometers down. The idea was to be so deep it doesn't matter if they know it's down there. But thanks for your concern."

  Jeff went out the lock with the sign and a hammer. When he got to the front of the rover he stopped. There were already footprints off the edge of the rover tracks. Six pairs of them out and back and a perfectly dark round hole in the regolith at the end about twenty centimeters in diameter, about four meters from the edge of their rover tracks. For one absurd instant, it made him think of a cup on a golf course green.

  The footprints were in a shallow chevron pattern. He walked out, adding his lugged sole prints to the tracks, leaned over and looked down the hole. There was the gold reflection of a coated optical surface a hand's breadth down the tube. He used the sign post to jam under it and lever it from the surface. It was a tube, light so it must be aluminum or titanium. Pointed at one end to push into the surface easily. The other end reflected back at him but it had too much mass, to be a thin glass and a band pass filter on the front face. Not a mirror then, a reflective prism. It hung suspended in the tube, to be exactly vertical.

  He turned to go back to the rover, but Mo had already came out. "Yes, I put that there."

  "But why?"

  "Just what I said. It's a target marker. Five years from now, ten years, whatever, the USNA wants to be able to target your tunnels. They don't have anything that can go that deep now, but they will be spending a great deal of money to develop something."

  Jeff did something he'd never done before. He reached down and folded up the flap on his holster and locked it in the up position with the snap. Mo was four meters away and had nothing in his hands, but he scared Jeff.

  "I understand if you shoot me, but let me tell you just a couple things first."

  "Go ahead and tell me. From over there," Jeff added.

  Mo nodded. "There are seven of those positioned. The locations are in my pad and my password is, "Lo tis a gala night just ain't it?", one apostrophe only in ain't, not lo, question mark.

  "Also, I'm given to understand the direction of research is to have missiles that can go that deep, fused to detonate by detecting a region of lower density ahead by fast neutron back-scatter. If you bore a horizontal spread of three or four small tunnels well above your main tunnel, it will likely cause a premature detonation and reduce or eliminate damage."

  "Go on," Jeff urged him when he stopped talking.

  "That's all. Tell my family I'm sorry and I love them. You can shoot me now."

  "I can shoot you now? Well thank you," Jeff said, infur
iated. "What if I bloody don't care to blow your stupid head off?" he yelled.

  Mo considered it carefully. "You can drive away. You can send somebody back for the suit."

  "What are you? CIA? Didn't they issue you the standard cyanide pill? Don't you have a hollow tooth with poison, or a bomb between your shoulderblades?"

  "I don't even know who hired me for sure. Two men in suits visited me when Linda was out with the kids. They told me I had to answer your ad in my job search. They made sure I saw they had guns, when they sat down and stood up, but they offered no ID. They explained that if I got offered your position and didn't take it, they'd see to it I'd never get hired by anyone else. If I did get your job and worked my contract out, then they'd make sure I got another decent position after I returned to Earth. I did ask who they were. They said what I didn't know I couldn't blab and not to start thinking above my station. One joked to the other that I must read spy novels. After I got hired they came back to give me the reflectors and told me what I had to do."

  "Could you help an artist do their faces?"

  "I could, but neither of them were striking. I was scared to death and it has been long enough now, I doubt if it would be very useful."

  "Could you look at photos and pick them?"

  "That's more likely. You have a database of USNA agents?" he asked skeptically.

  "Not now. But if I want one I'll damn well get it," Jeff vowed grimly.

  "They are going to know I failed. I don't see any way out of this for me," Mo said. He seemed near tears.

  "So, I drive off, then what are you going to do?"

  "I'll open my faceplate," he vowed. "It shouldn't be too bad," he hoped. "Quick."

  "Do it," Jeff invited him.

  "You don't think I have the nerve?"

  "No idea," Jeff admitted. "One way to find out."

  "You are cruel. I didn't think that of you," Mo said, disappointed. He stood a little straighter, closed his eyes, grabbed the chin bar under his faceplate and yanked. It made a loose >clack<. The inside interlock was disconnected in vacuum.

  "You didn't pay attention," Jeff accused him. "I told you when we were training, the gloves and the faceplate auto-lock in vacuum."