April 4: A Different Perspective

by Mackey Chandler

  Then he noticed his foot hurt and looking down, the end of his shoe was melted. He'd taken a shooting stance, one foot forward, beyond the protection of the reflective screen. He pushed the heel off with the other foot, but the sock stayed inside, welded to the shoe.

  Just then, a black spaceship landed on a pillar of white flame, in the parking lot.

  "This must be the place," Todd said cheerily, "Com went down, but I see a small fire by the building and the fuel pumps are on fire. Doing an extra argon flush for cooling, this doesn't look like a place we want to stay," he told April. "Oh, sorry, I forgot about you Control. Yes I'm down, no, I didn't think it was Ohio, there's not enough corn."

  Mel considered trying to run with one shoe, that seemed dubious, so he took the other off, but left the sock. "Come, Madam President, our ride is here." The shrubbery on the far side of the landscaping wall was burning, so they detoured to the left. There was a burnt strip across the grass, blackened to bare dirt in the middle. Mel helped Wiggen over the low wall.

  "Ah, here they come, terrific. Throat temp is green, I am sealing. My copilot is assisting with the passengers. Flush again and directly to pump down. Starting count to lift at three minutes. I wish I could tell them to move."

  Mel was indeed moving as best he could. He wasn't a sprinter even with his shoes. He still had to hold back for Wiggen. The last stim injector in his pocket seemed a bad idea. In his head he guessed thirty seconds to the ship. A hatch opened and a pretty decent ladder dropped out with a rattle against the ship. At least it had hard flat steps.

  "Dionysus' Chariot, there is a total shut down of all controlled airspace over North America. Nothing is to lift, everything in the air to land at the closest practical destination."

  "Sorry Control, it doesn't apply to me," Todd assured him.

  That apparently shocked North American Control speechless.

  "Passengers on the ladder," his number two advised him.

  "Lift in two minutes, if you can get them in the couches," he requested.

  The man pulled Wiggen through ahead of him. When Mel cleared the hatch the fellow lifted the cross bar supporting the ladder, twisted it to clear the hatch sides and tossed it outside. "Follow me," he said, moving quickly to a much better central ladder, that climbed up between two seats. He grabbed a take-hold and swung around above them. "Lady on the right," he pointed, "man here," he said, pointing to the opposite.

  He reached in, fastened belts over Wiggen, pulled the one across her middle tight and didn't mess with the others. When he turned, Mel had his own fastened, he gave a thankful nod and climbed above them.

  "Copilot in couch!"

  "Holding at five seconds. Belts?"

  "Belts on now."

  "PULL YOUR ARMS INSIDE THE COUCH!" he bellowed. "Your couches will move. Lift in five seconds."

  The couch did bend, legs lifting and back arching forward. There was a higher-pitched whine scrolling up and invisible forces tugged on them at weird angles and places. An invisible hand seemed to be pulling at their legs. Then they suddenly weighed far too much.

  Todd lifted at a moderate seven G, easing it up to ten G as the Singh compensators spun up and removed some of the perceived acceleration.

  "Ballistic interceptors!" his copilot called out. He'd seen them at the same time. On both sides ahead and rising faster than him. It appeared on the display he could pull another eight Gs and still not out climb them. They would roll over and dive on him, when he was high enough off the ground for the safety of the cities below. Only one place to go, he pushed the nose over and went back for the deck, still accelerating east.

  >>THUD<<

  The bump was distinct, sharp. His coffee had a sudden target of concentric waves dance on its surface. Motes of disturbed grit and dust floated down from the ceiling.

  "That can't be good," The General said aloud. He was three stories under the Pentagon. He was confident it was secured. and it would take one hell of a boom to be felt down here.

  Todd crossed DC at eight thousand meters passing up through Mach 7. He pulled up seeing the missiles self destruct above and behind him. They couldn't come down where their warheads would do as much damage as anything they were trying to intercept. He pulled up sharply enough to spare Maryland a great deal of grief, beyond broken windows. His sonic boom however crushed a corridor across from beltway to beltway in DC.

  "Apologies, Earth Control, some idiot shot at us and I had to duck. I'm afraid I painted a pretty hard footprint across the city, in violation of noise abatement. We were climbing through a pretty decent Mach number. I wouldn't have done that if the silly buggers hadn't shot at me. I most vehemently protest violation of our free travel, treaty rights." He was clear of North American Control by then, well over the Atlantic and above controlled airspace.

  "You protest? Noise abatement? It's showing on my emergencies list as an earthquake!"

  "Todd, you might be careful what you say," April spoke up. "My news channel popped up an alert. You knocked down the Capital dome. All sorts of historic buildings are collapsed. They have fires and the water mains are burst. It looks bad."

  "You're right, I won't apologize again, somebody might take it as an admission of liability. Was Congress in session?"

  "They are in recess and went home mostly, with the emergency."

  "Well, you can't have everything."

  "Did we get away?" Wiggen finally felt safe to call from the back.

  "Of course," Todd said, sounding insulted. "We're coming up on crossing Europe. My little girl could have flown that and posted it real time to entertain her friends. My copilot could have flown that without his morning coffee. It was merely interesting, not difficult. We shall be docked at Home within the hour."

  "Is he always so dramatic?" Mel asked.

  "Dramatic, was the day a spider walked across the main computer screen," his copilot told them. "I was afraid he was going out the lock without a suit. He's scared to death of the stupid things."

  "I thought I was leaving those evil things behind on Earth."

  Chapter 37

  "There is going to be an Assembly called midday," Faye told her students first thing. "I'd like to take you to the cafeteria right now, before people start to fill it up. It's a chance to see history being made. If you want to bring material to study that's fine. I'll feed anybody who doesn't have food service credits outstanding."

  "Do you want to sit all together?" one girl asked.

  "Yes, the usual thing they do, is set up a raised platform on the far wall, away from the serving area, under the big screen. I'd like us to sit at one corner of the dining area, near the counters. We can face the action there and yet see the whole room. It won't offend anyone, like we would hogging all the best down front seats. If you sit there, you can't really see very well when somebody stands to speak anyway. Sometimes the action in the crowd and who is putting their heads together in the audience, is more interesting than what happens on the platform. You might save video of it. I'll point out the official archives have no video of the action in the crowd. There have been people stand and leave in disgust, for example, but they said nothing and there was no comment on it in the official record."

  "But, what would that tell me?" a little fellow asked, scrunching his eyebrows up.

  "Well, if the man leaving is angry, you know he doesn't support the measure being put to a vote. But if he isn't saying anything, he sees speaking as pointless. He knows it is popular and going to pass. But if that man owns a business, you might expect he isn't going to be as friendly or helpful to the other business owners voting aye. He may even take his business away to another hab, or go back to Earth. We had a bank manager do that, second Assembly of Home and that bank is closed and gone now. The Assembly refused to say we would only use North American Dollars on Home to pay your debts. That upset him terribly and he withdrew. We can use Dollars or EuroMarks, Tongan money or Solars, anything somebody else will take. If you want to draw up your own pretty money
and offer it there is no law against it. You just might have a hard time getting anybody to accept it," she warned, "but it's legal." That got a round of laughter from the older kids.

  "Gather up what you need and we'll go over in ten minutes."

  * * *

  "This is amazing," April told Jeff. "Look at the news headers I'm getting. People were already upset about the White House getting burned. Now they are blaming the Patriots for bringing down the damage on the Capital. The Patriot Party is trying to shut down the networks. They have gone on camera a few places and arrested the anchors, too stupid to turn off the feed before putting the local news readers in cuffs. They are showing pictures of the Smithsonian and other museums, hammered flat as a pancake with collapsed roofs. Here's a pix of the Air and Space Museum with the tail of an old plane pushed out between crushed floors."

  The view switched to the Lincoln Memorial, his head gone and shoulders pushing up through the mound of debris from the collapse of the dome. The Washington Monument stood, but about three degrees off vertical and it looked like one good kick would drop it. As they watched police dressed for riot duty arrived and hustled the reporters off under arrest, destroying one team's camera as another documented it.

  "If there is any way you can persuade Wiggen to sit in on the Assembly of Home. I think it would be to our advantage and hers. The mood I see here," he waved at the news feed, "A sitting president, running for her life, may be as damaging a symbol as all this busted up real estate."

  "I'll ask her. She's no dummy, she may find it fits her agenda too."

  * * *

  "We need to strike out at Home. If they are allowed to get away with desecrating our national shrines, we will never be able to hold our heads up again," Colonel Allister said, with rock solid conviction.

  "President Hadley tried to shoot Home out of the sky with nuclear weapons, about two years ago now," The General revealed. "Do you know what happened?"

  "That was true then?" Allister asked shocked.

  "It was and both of them were intercepted, not by Home, but by the Japanese. The Space Forces had satellite coverage of the intercept. They have some sort of a beam weapon. Our guys covered it up, because they had no defense against it and they couldn't admit that to President Hadley. He'd already gone off the deep end and was having general officers dragged outside and shot in the head, over things nobody could predict or control.

  "Have they made any headway in countering it?"

  "We have no idea what the Japanese weapon is, or how many locations they have it deployed. Neither do we understand the entirely different weapon Home has developed. The Chinese seized one of their ships and would have cracked that secret, but when they returned the ship to Earth the private owner, not Home, not the Home militia, destroyed it on the ground."

  "That's insane to allow private parties heavy weapons!"

  "Crazier than you can imagine. He took out the main Chinese spaceport complex and the nearby civilian city that supported it. The crater is about four kilometers across, but the town was a hundred kilometers away and it was effectively destroyed."

  "With a single weapon?" Allister asked, finally looking concerned instead of angry.

  "Yes, something on the plus side of two-hundred megatons. If they dropped one on say, Pennsylvania, about a quarter of the state would be a parking lot. The really bad news I'm leading up to, is that there was a program left in place from before our last attempt, to use our anti-satellite system to hit Home, in conjunction with gaining control of North America. If I had known of that I'd have stopped it, given the changes that have happened since it was planned. But too many critical command links were killed in the previous failed coup, so it went ahead without orders to stop it. It did not entirely succeed. It inflicted damage and casualties, but failed to destroy Home. We are fortunate at present that their response has been to remove themselves from near Earth and set up housekeeping near the moon. We are thus free to consolidate our position in North America, but taking further action against Home would risk everything we have gained. It was a grand cause to pursue when we started, but now attacking them could threaten our very survival."

  "The interceptors that the Home shuttle was evading were much the same," Allister admitted. "They were tasked to shoot at anything violating that critical airspace and it would have taken somebody ordering them to stand down, to stop them from automatically firing. Modern warfare happens so fast there isn't time to consult and control. I don't even know at this point, if it was Wiggen loyalists, or our own, manning the base that shot at him."

  His mind was racing however. If blowing Home out of the sky was just a gesture, they could abandon, what really mattered? Was anything he was still doing a matter of principle if destroying Home could be set aside so easily? Did any of it matter now, or was it all just a grab for power?

  "That's water under the bridge, but we need to move forward with the situation we have now. You are doing well, but you need some subtlety," The General admonished him mildly, unaware of the conflicts he'd planted in the man's mind. "Let me explain how to shut down a TV station, without needlessly inflaming the public."

  * * *

  Lindsey drew in quick sure strokes, leaving the details of the seating and improvised stage to be filled in later. She concentrated on the faces, Robert Lewis, Eduardo Muños and Jon Davis to start, all taking seats on the raised platform as their right. The gravity of their expression precluded any humor about the humble setting. Neither did any of them need a suit or necktie to establish their status. They sat their plastic chairs like thrones, with unconscious authority.

  To one side Jeff Singh sat, with Heather anderson and April Lewis on either side. They didn't seek a place on the stage, though there was room, but she noticed they sat back to the wall looking over the crowd rather than part of it. Those who owned ships, especially more than one, sat around them and apart from the crowd.

  On the other side of the stage captains of the militia, the medical community and the owners of significant businesses, set themselves apart facing the crowd too. The head of the Private Bank, manufacturers and several shipbuilders clustered around Dave. Nobody assigned seats, they self-sorted into their perceived social order.

  Her brother Eric leaned over and spoke softly to her. Everybody was speaking in hushed tones. "There's a couple empty seats in front of Jeff's crowd. April laid her hand comp on the one and there's something else on the other, saving it. When somebody stopped and asked about the seat, April shook her head no and chased them off. Do you have any idea who isn't here, important enough to have their seats saved?"

  "No, I'll have to draw them in if they show up."

  Mr. Muños started keying the full sized computer he had open in front of him. Every comp and pad in the room gave a tone, or more commonly silent-vibrated. It was eerie, the entire room buzzed with discordant tones until you could feel it in the deck under your feet. Eric looked at his pad and it announced: System Message – The Fourteenth Assembly of Home is being convened in session this ninth day of May, 2086.

  When Eric looked up, Mr. Muños was standing up, but a couple were also entering from the corridor at the very last moment. April was standing too, retrieving the items off the seats in front of her and made sure the new arrivals saw where to go, before sitting back down.

  If Mr. Muños delayed a few seconds to let them get seated it was impossible to say. He didn't look their way and he was never one to rush his speech anyway. Sometimes in session he pondered a question at some length, before making a reply. He didn't seem to have any sense of urgency some might, having a couple thousand people quietly awaiting his reply.

  "That's the President," Lindley breathed in his ear.

  "Home doesn't have a President," Eric objected.

  "But North America does," she reminded him, exasperated.

  "Oh," he looked them over again. "She looks older than she does in the videos," he said. If he meant that as an excuse for not recognizing her, Lindsey couldn
't tell.

  "As is our custom, we shall skip any formal reading of the previous Assemblies. Records of them in their entirety, are available on station net. We beg your patience, this session, to hold off on introducing the usual day to day business and consideration of petitions, to examine the attack recently suffered upon Home, with loss of life and much damage. I yield to Jon Davis to relate what has been determined to have happened," he said, sitting back down.

  Jon spoke from his seat, comfortable with that small informality. His deep theatrical voice didn't need the advantage of his standing to project. "The attack on our habitat was launched from a satellite previously only noted as another item in traffic control's objects-in-orbit roster. It doesn't have any shuttle docking and exit notices in the traffic history, but that may be because such notices were actively suppressed, to hide its nature. It's a very small sat for a manned station and careful examination of radar images shows there are two more, with identical radar cross sections and similar orbital elements. The millimeter targeting radar, which the Rock partnership had deployed on its trailing property as a public service, was designed to warn of the usual large warheads and missiles, employed by most governments. It did not paint a return off the cloud of pellets which damaged Home, until they were literally milliseconds from impact. It did however, read sufficient of their terminal trajectory to pinpoint the satellite mentioned as the source, especially since there was no other nearby object competing with this craft as a source." He scowled, which was not a pleasant thing to see.