"Ounces? Troy ounces, not Solars?" April asked.
"They couldn't say Solars for political reasons, but a gram is a gram," Happy assured her. "You can't pay in any Earth currency unless you have that country sponsoring you."
"So who is sponsoring you? I can't see the Assembly getting involved," April insisted.
"I'll be a direct hire of a Mars corporation. They want to start bringing in snowballs and eventually rocks. The plan is to use Phobos as a base for a space station, and build up infrastructure on it. They have a plan to keep a small thruster working with waste material to keep it from dropping a little every year too. The stuff they bring in will orbit out further.
"Besides my previously secret work that's public now, I seem to have gained a good reputation having my name attached to various projects for Jeff. One of the backers of this Mars project was involved with the last snowball capture we did here. Seems he found out I helped train Barak for vacuum work, and was very aware he helped save that mission. So I'll be spending time on the moons again, as a glorified construction superintendant, although they give it a much better sounding job title, hoping you'll take that for some of your pay. I'll have the guy directing snowball and rock retrieval under me. And I'll be high enough up on the food chain this time to visit the surface at need, and I'll be the judge of that. I may even go along on some Jupiter missions if I can make a plausible case for it."
"It wouldn't surprise me if that turned out to be desirable," April said, with a wink.
"You never know," Happy agreed innocently. "How can I judge how it's being run from a distance with the time lag? It's a matter of safety," he said with a perfectly straight face.
"Which is pretty much the argument Jeff made for going down to the Isle today. I won't see you for a long time, years maybe," April said, sadly.
Happy shrugged. "I haven't been of much use to you youngsters lately. Most of the projects Jeff and I have done are sitting waiting for funding or for a market to grow. We have a pretty decent rough lay-out of a constant boost vessel designed for the Mars run, but there's no economic reason to build it yet. Partly due to the Martians' attitude about discouraging visitors. Partly because they aren't producing anything people need. It's been all expense and no return so far. Seems to me they should figure out tourism would give them some income, but I'm not going to rub their noses in the obvious as long as I can get in myself. Of course our designs will have to be updated, when the time comes we'll detail it, and there will be advances in materials and subsystems to incorporate, but that could be years from now.
"It looks like all of us have a few more productive years with Life Extension, even me. I might as well go do something useful and interesting. Maybe by the time these projects are done we'll have something else big to do. Somebody has to eventually come up with a star drive, but it's impossible to predict big advances. Genius and breakthroughs don't happen on a predictable time table."
"Are you hoping Jeff develops something?" April asked bluntly.
"Nope, not counting on that at all," Happy admitted. "Jeff is getting too old to make major discoveries. It's a young man's game because it requires flexible thinking. More likely a physicist of some exotic flavor. I know you don't like Earthies, but having billions of people ups the odds that one will make a breakthrough. Once somebody has a theory. . . then Jeff is really good at expanding on others' discoveries, not abstract theorizing. That's how he developed the fusion generator. Nothing in it was unique to him, but he put all the pieces together."
"I'll miss you," April insisted. Even though they hadn't been spending much time together.
"I'll miss all of you," Happy said softening it. "It isn't going to be as comfortable. I've gotten soft. I like my Wednesday poker game and older friends you don't see me with, but I do have a circle of friends. I'm spoiled by good food and beer when I want it. But I'm going to walk on Mars, and Barak tells me nothing can equal turning your face up and having Jupiter fill half the sky. I figure you'll get out there eventually, but I better do it while I can."
The big wall screen flashed bright yellow three times and a text box appeared on the map over the Pacific. April jumped up without a word to her grandpa and approached the screen, although the box was easily readable from a distance.
"Radar and infrared shows antimissile launch from Vandenberg AFB North American, consistent with intercept of Dionysus' Chariot on final approach to the Isle of Hawaiki.
"The Chariot tells me they will abort landing and climb over the intercept after they drop. The Isle will protect itself if the warheads divert to targeting them," Chen wrote.
The two interceptors were visible leaving the California coast as two icons on the screen. The shuttle was still west of Australia so the action spanned a third of the globe. The numbers beside the shuttle changed, indicating they were braking harder to throw the timing of the intercept off. The Chariot had lots of delta V, but the North American missiles had no ability to loiter if their target delayed. They were designed for ballistic targets from other Earth powers, with limited maneuverability.
April wasn't worried about the Isle. The ship had its own interceptor missiles, more of them than the four the shuttle carried, and laser weapons for shorter range.
"Chen, do you have a channel to object to North American control about this?" April asked. Her words appeared in the floating box.
"Not their military," Chen spoke, and it too was rendered in text. He had a tiny video window open in the corner of the screen but it was too small to read his facial expressions well.
"You can talk to Houston Space Traffic Control, but they may or may not pass it on. The Chariot has not tried talking to anybody but the Isle."
"I imagine they are too busy for chatter. Try please," April asked. "I'll stay linked in. They need to stop this or I'll stop it for them," April promised. Behind her Happy perked up. There wasn't any way she'd 'stop it' that wouldn't be messy.
Even at the reduced size of the thumbnail it was easy to read on his face that Chen looked alarmed.
April watched as Chen requested contact with Earth Control through Home local. That was easily achieved. The regional military control over Vandenberg could be heard responding but declining to speak to them directly. Vandenberg themselves never came on the circuit.
"All Home vessels are assumed to be armed and hostile, this is not a civilian traffic issue," Houston was told. "We are still at a state of war and they are assumed to be belligerents."
"They knew Jeff was on this one," Happy said behind her. The screen ignored his voice and didn't render it in text for Chen.
April cut her input and nodded agreement. "They'd been ignoring traffic to the Isle of Hawaiki for months, and all of a sudden it's belligerent now," she told her grandpa.
"Restore audio input, retain text," April instructed the display. Some commands shouldn't be rendered in text, they needed a human context. She tried to pitch her voice low and firm.
"This is April Lewis on Home," she spoke up, hoping she was tied in all the way through. "You know damn well my partner is aboard that shuttle. If you fire on it again you will have more descending traffic in your sky than you ever wanted to see. Back off! Or I will take your game piece off the board."
"Houston," the military controller said, "please refrain in the future from passing through com from every child with a pocket phone. Only concern yourself with legitimate traffic data."
"Thank you Houston, this is no longer your concern," April said icily. Child indeed. That left her without any desire to continue talking, if they were going to be insulting.
Another text box from Chen marked a new double launch from Vandenberg. Did she provoke that? Probably not, they'd have done it anyway when they saw Jeff maneuver. Their command sequence was probably too slow for it to be a response to what she'd said. That second launch was going to require the Chariot to actively engage them. Nothing she could do to help them with that from here. But there wouldn't be a third launch. She took
the extra second to feed her weapons board overlay to Chen as a courtesy. He deserved to see what happened, but she didn't take the time to explain what she intended. It would quickly become obvious to him.
April cut the audio to Chen, reached to the screen, gathering a group of retro orbited rods still back over the Atlantic between her fingers, and said, "Reserve and activate." A swipe of her hand did the same to a bundle of rods orbiting the other direction, still well behind Dionysus' Chariot over the Indian Ocean. A few commands told them to decelerate for TOT arrival at Vandenberg on the California coast within seconds of each other. There were two hundred coming from each direction. Vandenberg was the preeminent Space Defense site in North America. April expected a robust defense. They had no inside intelligence on the base, but the overhead views showed gross features like buildings and what had to be ballistic defenses on the perimeter. A few taps on the expanded view assigned rods to points she called out as targets by a tap on the screen and assigning an order of importance verbally. The computer sorted resources and commands to the best approximation on the fly.
Right behind the first wave of rods she scheduled a trio of devices to fill the sky with vaporized calcium. It was cheap and worked almost as well as more expensive metals like cesium to create a ceiling of radio opaque plasma, blinding their radars. The second wave of rods would target the launch sites that revealed their location by firing on the earlier wave of rods. The interceptors would have much less time to engage the second round of rods appearing out of the overhead cover of vaporized metal. Beam weapons were useless against solid rods with only a forty millimeter cross-section. By the time they burned off the guidance vanes the rods were already pretty well aimed where they would hit.
Behind the second wave of rods the next few weapons were active not just kinetic. They carried relatively small warheads of about ten kiloton. Not nukes, but energy storage devices their lunar allies invented. They would detonate at the surface unless there were still effective interceptors that made them fail fuse above or outright killed them. April tapped and designated targets for those. Just about any large building and those near the runways seemed a good bet to hit. Some few might get nudged off course, but the whole base was a target rich environment. They could as easily get nudged to a higher value target.
If not enough of those got through their defenses she was prepared to do it all over again. April wanted to lay a big warhead on the base, but they were precious and on a big obvious bus that didn't maneuver and threw a large radar return. They were nowhere near as sturdy or hard to hit as rods. She wouldn't take a chance on one being intercepted and wasted. She wouldn't even order one out of orbit until she felt she controlled the sky over the base.
"Good," Happy said approvingly from behind, watching her. "You can't do this by half measures or they'll be second guessing it and speculating they might be able to hold you off next time."
The plot showed Dionysus' Chariot, after avoiding the first pair of missiles, had to engage the second pair. They managed to hit them, but it took all four interceptors it carried.
The base hit two of the smaller warheads. Too many for her to risk dropping the big one. She hated to use them up extravagantly, but laid another wave of rods on the surviving launch sites and then another half dozen small warheads. All but one got through and burst at ground level. The base had to be in ruins, but that didn't fully make the point she intended. She wanted a flat parking lot, not ruins. She dropped another cloaking device all the way down to eight kilometers before it spread a sheet of calcium plasma across their sky blinding any surviving radar for some seconds.
The precious bus with a fusion warhead came out of that overhead and was hit hard enough to make it detonate in fail-safe mode not much below eight thousand meters. It must have been a beam weapon, it happened too fast for an interceptor to climb that high. It still produced a full yield, almost three hundred megaton. The fireball kissed the ground hard melting a depression several kilometers across and throwing melt over four counties, but it didn't dig a classic crater. The over pressure came down like a hydraulic press on the base. While it didn't dig a deep crater, it pressed a wider dip around the shallow crater, near twelve kilometers across. Any bunkers would be collapsed. The earthquake was felt all the way from Portland to the end of the Baja, and triggered minor natural rumblings. It busted windows all across downtown Los Angeles, and caused panic from San Diego to San Francisco.
April hesitated. They just didn't have that many of these warheads to waste even one being artistic. But she'd intended to mark them worse than that. She could dig them a huge new bay on the Pacific that nobody would forget for generations. But Jeff would be better impressed with restraint now she decided. The whole exercise was in his behalf and he might feel it was done overmuch. She was certain she valued him more than he did himself. The battle from the first launch until the last detonation lasted almost twenty minutes.
"Did they attack the Isle?" April asked Chen. She'd been too busy to see what the first two North American interceptors did after Jeff evaded them.
"No, they fell in the ocean. They didn't destroy them in the air either, but they went down well west, nowhere close to the Isle of Hawaiki," Chen reported.
"Watch them," April ordered. "I'm done with Vandenberg," she decided, "but if they try anything else I'll do the same to their fancy new Capitol they're building in Vancouver. With any luck we'd catch the all treacherous scum in session."
"Unfortunately, they're nowhere near moved in," Chen informed her. "We are observing them build, and it's still an unfinished shell."
"OK, then I'm going to stand down unless they start shooting again," April told Chen, and took a deep breath. "Perhaps this was sufficient to demonstrate belligerent to them so they'll recognize it next time," April snarled.
"As I was saying. . . you young folks don't really need me around anymore," Happy said, waving at the screen as evidence April could act on her own just fine.
"You approve then?" April asked. If Happy had some critique she'd accept it, from him.
"I don't see what else you could do," Happy said, with an exaggerated shrug. "If they can take a pot-shot at you anytime they are in the mood and suffer no price, it will never end. Why did we bother to move out here past L2 if we're just going to allow them to keep sniping at us any time a Home ship or citizen comes in range of them? No, they needed a lesson today. I hope it was sufficient," he said, but his voice lacked any confidence.
"For now, maybe." She was scanning the screen and nothing was launching at them. Chen would have told her if anything was happening elsewhere off screen. Then a message with a high priority code appeared.
"I've decided to return to Home," Jeff told her. "We are proceeding to a lunar insertion orbit and then Home. We should be out of range of any danger now."
"No! I thought you'd just do another orbit and try to land again," April said sarcastically.
"One learns. . . slowly. But one does learn," Jeff insisted. "I'll see you for breakfast the day after tomorrow."
"It's a date," April agreed. "I'll meet you at dock."
Jeff just barely acknowledged it with an "OK," and disconnected.
"You want to search the Earthie news and see how they are taking it?" Happy asked.
"They and their precious public opinions can go straight to the Devil in the same cozy hand basket," April said. "Did you bring some dessert? I have coffee all set to brew."
Chapter 2
Jonathan Hughes was almost done for the day. The Kings County Farmer's Cooperative Number Three was under a hiring freeze, so he was doing the job of near two men. He couldn't put the extra hours on his time report, but the work still had to be done. If he didn't want to be paid for the official hours and do the rest on his own time there were plenty of folks waiting to take his job on those terms. He was fifty nine years old and glad they hadn't already forced him out for a younger man.
He'd outlasted the previous three owners of the land and surv
ived the transition to government control of the farm as well as consolidation with other private tracts. So he did know the land and business. The land was about the last agricultural land this close to LA. If they hadn't enacted very strict anti-urbanization laws about twenty years ago, he was sure the fields would all be condos and subdivisions right now. It slowed it down, but he had no doubt the population pressure would have it paved over and built up in another two decades. He wouldn't be here or working for the Coop in twenty years so that wasn't his concern.
The field he looked over had been in almonds over forty years ago. He remembered passing them on the way to school. Old Mr. Gant who he'd worked for out of high school had told him stories about the same fields being in tomatoes, and had unbelievable tales of migrants hand picking them in the fields. Funny how none of those changes had ever seemed important enough to be in his history lessons.
Last year the field had been in beans and it was planted in rye right now. It was so short it didn't look anything like the rye grown when he was a kid. You'd have to run a roller over it to make it lodge. The last couple years had been iffy for frost. He'd seen hot years and cold years, and two serious droughts in his career. If the rye didn't fully mature for grain it would serve for silage at a good price, as well as keep down the weeds for the spring planting. The weeds were all herbicide resistant now, but the government planting manual insisted they had to be used. The rye really helped as long as you didn't say that was a reason for planting it. Like his hour tally, it was far from the only lie required to game the system. Jon would have spent the money on fertilizer, but then he didn't have stock in any herbicide companies.
The sun was on the horizon when he was finally done repairing the piping for irrigation. A bright line across the southern sky caught his eye and he looked. It was unusual to see a meteor so bright against the steel blue sky even this near sundown, and then there was another. . .
The streaks high overhead from the east were joined by a faint splay of others lower on the far horizon to the southwest. They all converged on an unseen point well below the horizon. LA? Was Jon's first thought, but no, it was angled too far to the west. He wasn't sure where it was aimed. The huge 'V' of bright points all vanished over the horizon to a meeting point he couldn't see, then a flare of light spread a thin silvery cloud barely visible, that expanded and changed colors. Even this far away it had lightning visible flashing around the edges, low and to the left of the sunset.
A Sudden Departure (April Book 9) Page 2