April 4: A Different Perspective

by Mackey Chandler

  * * *

  "Aren't you going to work?" Lindsy asked.

  "Who's going to go to a nightclub in the middle of running for our lives?" her mom asked, like she was crazy.

  "Everything was open, people are going around doing everything just like normal. They just have their suits with them. You should at least call them, if you're not going in. I shouldn't have brought you breakfast back. It just let you hole up here. There isn't any reason not to go have breakfast, well lunch pretty soon. But if I hadn't brought it back, you'd have had to go see yourself. That was really unkind to yell at Eric for not bringing us food back. I have no idea where he went off to. I'm kind of worried about him."

  "Why aren't you worried about me?" Linda asked.

  "I guess you forgot. You're supposed to be the adult," Lindsy said, angrily, but it wasn't the old petty peevishness she draped over everything. She took her bag and went out too and she didn't say where she was going. That never happened.

  * * *

  "This is how you keep prisoners?" Lieutenant Moore asked. Commander Lu was checking him into the Holiday Inn. He set his chop on the guest sheet to guarantee the charges and put his hanko back in a sealed pocket, but he did print on the tab: On behalf of Home Militia.

  "Don't bitch, or I'll take you to the Radisson," he threatened. "We don't have a jail. Hope to God we never do. But they asked me to bring you back. Personally, I'd have just shot you in the head like your buddy, but hey, I knew two of the people your war shot killed."

  The prisoner looked at him sharply. It was obvious he didn't know whether to believe him.

  He stuck the card in a door and let them in, sitting on the bed right away. Moore settled in a chair, apparently relaxed. Lu had filled the other chair with a bag in passing.

  "You didn't know what you were shooting at?" Lu asked, that questioning look in the lobby still eating at him.

  "We key the numbers in they give us. Nobody tells us what we're shooting at."

  "That means you've had fire missions before. Interesting. Why isn't there a crap load of your shot flying around LEO bumping into everything?"

  "In training, they said you take your time and set up a shot so it carries the target debris along and dumps in the atmosphere. But I wasn't very good at that, too slow at the math and got bumped to weapon maintenance. The targeting guys are on Earth and go home every night."

  "What did the Captain do then?"

  "He talked to Earth a lot, with his earphones on so I couldn't hear one side. Sometimes he'd text, if I shouldn't hear his side. I'd load him up a shot and check the rails for wear after and do all the maintenance and scut work. Change the filters and scrub the head, while he lay in his bunk, listening to music and didn't share his booze."

  "You didn't shoot?"

  "I'm trained how. I was supposed to be the back-up, if he had a heart attack or something. I've done it in sims, but never real life."

  There was a tap at the door, instead of using the intercom. "Open," Lu instructed.

  "Good evening Master Lu," the slight fellow who entered said, with a dip of the head that was more than a nod and less than a bow.

  "Thank you, Chen. I'll be going. I appreciate you coming on short notice. This is Lieutenant Moore, of the USNA Space Forces. I'm not sure if he is a prisoner of war, a criminal suspect, or a victim of kidnapping. I'm sure he is a damned nuisance. I'll have some relief for you in twelve hours. We want you to baby-sit him. Keep him from communicating with any official USNA agency. Do not allow him to buy, or otherwise acquire weapons, feed him as needed and take him to the clinic if he has a health complaint, even if it is not a visible problem," he added. "If you take him in the corridors or cafeteria be alert to protect him. There may be some who would figure out who he is and want to harm him."

  Moore looked startled at that, like it was a new thought he hadn't expected.

  "That's your stuff in the bag," Lu told Moore, waving at it. "Al cleaned out your locker and stuffed it in there. I imagine it's chaos, if you want to repack it. If you want to call family or friends, but not your command, feel free. But I'd suggest you think on it hard. You may be listed as dead and seeing how North America rewards anybody that is an embarrassment, there might be advantages to staying dead. Even a call to family may give you away. If you want to go out to dinner instead of room service, I'd suggest putting on a civilian outfit. I expect sometime in the next day, there will be an Assembly of Home and they will call you to answer questions.

  "What is the Assembly?"

  "The citizens and voters of Home. We have a democracy of all those who have agreed to fund the government and run it by straight up electronic poll. Depending on the issue and the level of interest, how many log on, it can be anywhere from around eight hundred, to eighteen hundred folks, meeting in the cafeteria and following online. The Assembly formulates law, approves budget items, declares war and hears criminal cases."

  "Will they decide my fate then?"

  "They might, if they take an interest in it. We have almost no law and it is a guiding principle that we want to avoid making law as much as possible. As far as I know, there isn't even a law against murder, just custom. So you may face any censure the Assembly wants to impose, if in their collective wisdom what you did is wrong. On the other hand, kill the right people for a popular reason and they may commend you and give you a commemorative medal. Not really so different from your service for North America, is it?"

  Moore thought about that a bit and decided it was better not to answer. Instead he said, "Surely there is some prejudice toward the guilty side, if I am presented under arrest."

  "I was asked by my militia superiors to bring you in. I decided to do so, but we have no established law about the powers of the militia, or any immunity for serving in the militia. I am unaware of any generalized arrest power residing in the militia. It's established station security has such power. If anyone objects to my confining you, I would never cite following orders as an excuse. That has such a historic taint it would work against me. No, I'd say it seemed to serve necessity. Spacers understand necessity and respect it just fine. If I am found in error for not executing you in the field, it is easily corrected," he said, without any animus.

  "Good day, Chen," Lu repeated, moving to the door. "Do not assume the prisoner is passive. He has more or less admitted he would fire a weapon on orders, blind to its target. That says to me he has a fundamentally different morality and view of authority than we hold. He may think on all we said and decide we don't have sufficient authority to detain him."

  "Good advice. I had come to similar conclusions."

  "You are leaving him to guard me and he doesn't even have a pistol like you?" Moore asked, puzzled.

  When they got through laughing and wiped the tears away, Lu left with not a word of explanation.

  "The advantage of guarding a prisoner without a weapon, is that he can't take it away from you," Chen said, after they had sat silently for some time. He had that formal tone, like one of Moore's professors lecturing. The more he thought about it the less he liked it. The fellow was no bigger than him and he didn't look that dangerous, he decided.

  "Lu said the shot from my station killed some people. Is that true?"

  "The shot from your station? Young man, that is such an ugly attempt to distance yourself from what happened. The station didn't shoot on its own. It was hardly a teeming habitat, with such a large population we wonder who was involved. Yes, the shot killed seven people, all civilians and injured a number of others. It also did several tens of millions of dollars damage. Mitsubishi has decided to move M3 entirely out of LEO and to a halo orbit between the moon and L2 due to this attack. It's just too dangerous to stay close to Earth, where there are so many ways to be attacked, with very little warning."

  Moore didn't have any reply to that.

  * * *

  "We will cut our initial burn, adjust our attitude, service the ships pushing Home, adjust for a different reactive mass mix and
do a new burn in about thirty hours." Jeff added to the M3 news site. "We are already in a higher orbit and climbing. If you are waiting for a shuttle ride be aware some carriers are docking at the north end while we are in transit, to avoid maneuvering around the active drives on the south end."

  * * *

  The truck stop wasn't very busy. The unrest had taken a lot of truckers off the road. Hijackers were using the law enforcement disruptions to snatch even low value freight, so the volume of driverless trucks was way down too. Some were uncertain who had authority. If they voluntarily stopped at a weigh station, with officials wearing either plus pins or brassards, would it taint them at the next stop down the road? Carrying freight destined for Federal agencies seemed just as fraught with hazard. Did the official signing for your freight really have authority to receive it? Even local police were taking sides and pulling over cars with out of state plates or that had that plain agency look, searching for officials of the opposing camp.

  Common civilian traffic was down too and some of the traffic on the road looked like it would be worth your life to pull over. A large four wheel drive pickup truck, with four rough looking men, had matched speed briefly with them this morning and looked them over carefully before pulling ahead. Wiggen had turned her face away, aware it was well known. Mel wasn't so well known by the public, so he'd looked at them brazenly. They were displaying no weapons and he probably outgunned them with the laser, but getting in a firefight would pull down all sorts of fatal attention on them.

  It was a warm day for the season and Mel left Wiggen in the outside dining area. There were two other single customers enjoying the break in the weather. Drivers by their clothing. It was still cool enough nobody would think it odd for a woman to have her hood up. He'd altered his appearance against facial recognition, something he knew well from his training and went in and bought them burgers and fries, the first decent fresh food they had enjoyed in days. He set up the satphone, which looked so much like any laptop it wouldn't attract attention. There were much more compact models, but none that let him pick on which sat he could lock and have complete control of his apparent identity.

  He took a bite of burger. It was average, but a treat after a few days of military meals and energy bars. There was a low brick wall and bushes around the patio, not any real barrier, but enough to discourage people from using the tables without coming in through the food court. A short lawn separated the wall from the parking area and to the right a little, was a canopy over the fuel pumps that extended to the doors. The car parking was only at the curb here and behind and beyond the pumps was truck parking, mostly empty now, he was happy to see. There was a huge section of bare lot three or four times as big as they'd indicated the shuttle needed to land.

  The rain shelter for the pumps probably wouldn't shelter them much from the flash they'd been warned about in the east, but they'd been told it would just dazzle them, not injure. If the pilot landed where he anticipated, they had a bit less than a hundred meters to run to the ship.

  He connected through the sat, low in the southern sky. If the building stuck out a couple more meters it would have blocked his line of sight to it. "We're in location and there's a big area of vacant parking lot to set down."

  "That's good," April said, "I'll send you the feed from the ship. They are mid-continent and dropping. They'd pass south of you, but will make a slow long turn north when they bite a little more air. They dropped pretty late, trying not to look like a Trans-Pacific missile strike, called Earth Control just moments ago and are telling them they will call local control when under sixty thousand meters, for an emergency landing."

  Mel split his screen and put the feed from the Dionysus' Chariot beside April. "I'm not sure," the new pilot Todd Ostrovitch, was telling Earth Control, omitting a solid reason for an emergency landing. "I've never done an aerobraking maneuver with this puppy. This is in fact, its first manned flight. Yes, I heard in a general way about Antarctica. Landing as a robot I'm sure they gave it a long safe glide path. If I take too long I may dump this brick in the Atlantic, I'd rather Ohio. Would you hand me off to North American Control please?" he inquired politely.

  "He's totally bullshitting them isn't he?" Mel marveled.

  "Yes, that's why Dave picked him. They had three qualified to fly her, but he was the one who explained why he should fly her, with the densest cloud of confusing, double talking crap, so Dave picked him."

  "Well, since you North Americans signed a treaty swearing you would in no way impede travel to and from Home, I don't see how you can deny me landing clearance, me bucko. What? I bob up and down, because when the nose gets to twenty-five hundred degrees, I can either pull up a bit or watch the damn nose start to melt just the other side of my view ports. That's why. If you were here I'd let you take the stick and see if you could do any better you bloody critic."

  "His copilot says he's twelve to fourteen minutes out. You can hit Alt-D in this window and talk to him direct if you really need to, but there may be some relay lag."

  "Sure I have a computer to fly it," Todd went on, "but the engineers set it to force a pull up to cool off at twenty-two hundred degrees. Silly over caution, I didn't get any surface blistering and the nose art didn't burn off until just past twenty- six hundred. Besides, the copilot has the main screen tied up chatting with his honey in Tonga. She's a shuttle pilot too… Oops, something fell off. Did you get a radar return, NA Control? No? Well it can't have been anything important then, she's still flying. Though she wants to hink a tad left now."

  "This recording is going to be a cult classic," April marveled. "Right up there with the ground speed check by the SR-71."

  "Yes, he's insane," Wiggen acknowledged. "And I'm going to ride behind him."

  * * *

  "We have another voice intercept on Wiggen," Col. Allister told The General. It was the first time he felt confident of a message's importance to use his priority code to call him. "It's an international call again, France. and they seem to be maintaining the connection this time."

  "That will be a relay point."

  "Uh, yeah. That's coming in now. Looks like a satphone, spoofed nicely, but the voice gave it away. Western Virginia, sir."

  "Well scramble a tactical aircraft assigned to support Homeland Security," The General instructed. "And call me when you have a positive DNA match off the body," he said, before disconnecting.

  Did he mess up? Allister wasn't sure. He'd expected The General to stay on com and follow the last minutes of the hunt. Wasn't it exciting?

  * * *

  Home militia was doing an overview on request and broke in: "Home-net warns you have a tactical support aircraft squawking HLS transponder, climbing out hard a hundred-eleven kilometers north east of you. Estimated time to probable gravity bomb release, four plus minutes, he will beat your ride by at least three minutes. No militia intercept possible," he added, even though that was already what they had agreed upon.

  "Should we run?" Mel asked.

  "You'd never get off the lot," the militia guy on circuit answered honestly.

  "Wish I was there, I'd laser him," April said.

  "I have a Singh laser," Mel said, matter-of-fact.

  "WHAT?"

  "I have a Singh laser pistol."

  "What bearing for the aircraft Home?" April demanded.

  "Fifty degrees east of north."

  "Can you see the horizon that direction?" April asked.

  "I can. Get behind me," he told Wiggen, standing back from the table.

  "Tell the pistol - Aircraft, pop-up bomber, head on, single shot. Aim just over the horizon and hold it out at arm's length."

  "I won't need to pull the trigger?" Mel asked, after repeating that.

  "No, better to close your eyes. Your diversion is going off soon too," April warned.

  "Look down!" Mel yelled at Wiggen. When he lifted the pistol to the horizon one diner dove under his table. The other scrambled for the door inside. He had to aim under the c
lose-by fuel island canopy, but the trucks were to one side.

  Eight kilometers north the autopilot pulled the nose up sharply, applied airbrakes and opened the internal weapons bay on the semi-stealth aircraft. Of the four small cluster bombs selected, the front two had their clamps spring open. The aircraft actually started to brake from around the bombs to allow them to continue on their way. They separated a few centimeters and the pistol read the profile of the plane off its lidar.

  The pistol twisted slightly in his hands, aiming itself. The lidar wasn't at a visible frequency. The roll around the muzzle blew with a pop, unfurling a sheet of gold-coated Mylar between him and the beam, to protect him from the backscatter.

  The laser pistol dropped all the safety limits due to the single shot command. It quickly found a resonant frequency for the aircraft skin and devoted the first few hundred milliseconds to walking a tight grid across the airframe, that left it a loose collection of chunks flying the same direction. When the internal resistance indicated its power buses were starting to melt it throttled back the current rise at a level that would let it run another full second. Optimized to destroying a single aircraft with certainty, it then got to serious work on the fuselage and the beam swept down the belly, bisecting the nose and cockpit and inside the open weapons bay, it found the two bombs. It would have cut the plane in two lengthwise, but after the bombs went off it didn't matter much.

  "Is it going to…>FLASH< …..>FLASH<…..shoot?"

  Out over the Atlantic, well over most of the atmosphere, Jeff detonated a two-hundred megaton device, a couple tenths of a second after the laser fired. It really shouldn't have damaged any modern, reasonably shielded, device. But there are always those who take shortcuts in design and maintenance. So even though it was not optimized for EMP, it damaged several satellites, a few ships who needed rescue and damaged one airliner bad enough it turned back to Miami. It also destroyed a lot of obsolete electronics on the east coast and put North America into an air defense panic.

  "Damn," Mel muttered, looking at the pistol in his hand. It had a few remnants of gold Mylar around the muzzle. The whole end was bent, drooping and it was fuming out the bore. He holstered it automatically, against any rational possibility it would ever work again. The satellite phone he'd shot over was destroyed, the screen shattered by thermal shock, the keyboard melted. The tabletop on which it sat was delaminated and humped in the middle with a blistered finish in a band across the middle. The basket of food on his side of the phone had ignited, the greasy fries and paper liner burning brightly. As bright as it was, the laser beam and fireball of the plane was lost in the greater light that filled the sky behind it, still fading.