A Sudden Departure (April Book 9)

by Mackey Chandler

  Mo started to say something and thought better of it.

  "A bit past a million kilometers out, it disappeared in a flash of light," Heather said.

  "Exploded?"

  Heather shook her head no. "Disappeared. Jeff said there's a mathematical basis to believe it made a quantum transition to the Centauri system."

  Mo was an engineer. He thought on it a few seconds, and shook his head.

  "Disappeared here does not mean it appeared there. I very much doubt they have any way to verify that. Four point something light years means we couldn't know until a signal came back, and it would take a very powerful directional signal to confirm it. I doubt you could even detect a nuclear explosion at that range. I don't have any idea offhand how I'd go about verifying it. The mass of any powerful enough radio you'd need to send would be prohibitive."

  "That's why we don't want to talk it up," Heather agreed. "First we were snooping. The fewer people know we do that, especially the specifics of how, the better. We had no indication they knew we observed. The fellow, Weir, already accused Jeff of spying on him when he wasn't, so I have no doubt he would speak up again if he suspected.

  "Second we have no idea if it got there or in what shape it got there. Jeff speculated it might just appear disassembled – as a shower of particles. We won't know until somebody makes one that can go. . . and jump back to us.

  "It would be a shame to call attention to their work and be the cause of Brazil or North America interfering with their research, or building a better wall of secrecy around it. We're certainly in no position to finance such a huge project ourselves right now. So we hope to benefit from their continued work, if we can."

  Mo looked unhappy, and Heather wondered if he regretted his vow.

  "Well, I thought I had big exciting news, but even the possibility that someone has a way to build a star-drive completely eclipses it," Mo said.

  "Oh, then I guess we'll skip dessert too," Heather said.

  Mo looked at her like she was insane, and then exploded with laughter.

  "You do have a way of putting things in perspective. Life goes on, doesn't it?"

  "Yes," Heather agreed, "even such mundane things as cherry cheesecake."

  "Cherries?. . . importado! You spoil me."

  "We'll get around to growing them eventually," Heather promised. "More coffee?"

  * * *

  When the cheesecake was finished Heather made a show of pushing her dish away.

  "It's getting late. You better tell me your news, or I'm going to kick you out without hearing it, so I can go to bed," Heather threatened.

  Mo reached in a pocket and retrieved little plastic baggy, the sort you pinched on the corner to unseal. It appeared to have some gravel in it, but once he poured them in his hand she caught the metallic sheen.

  "I've been processing regolith with the machine the French traded us for the tunnel borers."

  "How much moon dust does that represent?" Heather asked.

  "About a ton and a half, but it was particularly rich dirt we gathered from a somewhat shaded crater. We're finding the finer dust back in the cracks of the crater walls and filling crevasses is worth collecting first. The thing is, their machine is easy to reproduce. It wouldn't be especially easy to upscale, but there is no reason we can't build a thousand of them in the next few years."

  "And it's worth doing?" Heather asked.

  "I doubt you had any idea how worthy, when you made the trade. How desperate were they?"

  "Pretty desperate. I'd say their survival depended on it," she admitted. "They could always count on supplies because their support was a matter of national pride for France. Suddenly if they want any real independence they have to pay their own way. I'm not saying they won't still do business with France, the parting being amiable is more appearances than literal. They still are buying things like parts for all their machinery from France. But if they run a deficit it isn't going to be hidden as a minor line item in a huge Earth nation budget. They'll borrow and pay for it now like anyone else.

  "When they wanted spare parts and improvements for the boring machines they hadn't thought to include in the original deal, I also made them reveal how to make the armor we bought from them before too. That spoke to inexperience that they neglected maintenance items."

  "That's nice," Mo said, "but this was the bigger trade. They either brought out the best stuff first to get what they needed, or maybe they didn't have much in the way of lesser stuff to offer. The thing about this process is it separates each element to five nines purity in one pass. You can improve efficiency several ways. You first separate certain bulk minerals electrostatically, and take the iron out magnetically. There are some things like clusters of glass particles that you can just sieve out. This reduces the bulk by well over half. Those can then be set aside as tailings. Each sort of 'waste' will still have valuable elements worth recovering if there is need of them.

  "If history is any indication, after enough years, and all the pay-dirt is processed, tailings then become the next generation's ore. They're actually to the stage of mining landfills of old trash on Earth. But for now, we take the milled and reduced dust and run it through the French machine. The dust is crushed again until it can't be handled any finer because the particles cling to each other. The dust is vaporized and the vapor comes in contact with a large rotating drum coated with carbon nanotubes on end. The majority of the vapor condenses back to dust and is recycled."

  "So it strips a monatomic layer off this drum each turn?" Heather asked. "That has to take forever."

  "This is just the prototype, and it has a three square meter surface turning at a hundred thousand rpm. So it strips three hundred thousand square meters a second. Near twenty square kilometers a minute.

  "The vapor is grabbed on the end of the nanotubes as individual atoms. A few tubes get no passengers, and a smaller number grab double molecules like hydrogen that combined back together before touching a nanotube. You lose some of the volatiles like that if you don't catch them in a cold trap. That's just one of the improvements we'll make over the original French version."

  "The key to the whole thing is being able to control the release of each element from the end of the nanotubes. It's the timing that allows each one to be released on an exact trajectory to its own collection plate. Most of the solids look like soot as they build up. Things like sulfur and gasses the French were willing to waste. We want to harvest everything and waste nothing, so we're experimenting with various types of traps."

  "Why would the French throw away the gasses?" Heather wondered. "They have need of atmosphere too. They import nitrogen in bulk and other gasses in smaller quantities."

  "I suspect they have no effective way to store it in bulk," Mo guessed, "but one of my fellows suggested a very effective method. We haven't done this yet, but we're working on it. We'll put the gases in beads made of lunar glass. We can fill them to around three pascals and they are still available as a resource later if we crack them open.

  "What the young man came up with that really impressed me is a way to save the helium3 in these beads. We coat the inside with a polymer and convert it to graphene from outside with a laser. He's done that with sheet glass so we know it works."

  "What are the. . . shot?" Heather asked, nodding at the pieces in his hand.

  "Just a few samples. Most of it is still dust so fine we couldn't handle it in the air here, or it might spontaneously combust," Mo warned. "These are just a few samples we fused to give you an idea what one machine will produce. Some very useful bulk things like titanium we separated out in the tailings pile, but it's still recoverable. In a year I can have maybe three hundred separators running. Possibly more if you'll agree to channel the resources back into building them for a fast start.

  "Chromium, about a twenty gram nugget," he said laying it on a napkin between them. "Cobalt near six grams, although I don't expect it to be that high everywhere. Copper, well a few milligrams, but it'll add
up with enough machines running." He dropped a piece on the napkin the size of a grain of rice.

  "Platinum, we got almost two grams, but we also got all the other platinum group metals in smaller quantities. Gold a bit under three grams," he said, dropping a peanut sized oval on the paper. "Thorium was a surprising four plus grams, and uranium we got almost a gram," he said finishing out the pieces.

  "So, if we have a thousand of these working in three years, we'll be harvesting how many multiples of these?" Heather demanded.

  "This took a month to run. I saw your eyes light up on the gold. We could be producing thirty kilograms annually in three years. Roughly a thousand ounces. Call it twelve hundred Solars."

  "That's a fortune," Heather said stunned.

  "You like gold because it's fungible, but the others are just as surely wealth. And more of it really. No reason to arbitrarily stop building separating machines at a thousand. What you really have to decide is how many dedicated fabricators to build them you want. Ten? A hundred? We're not going to run out of regolith for centuries. The first few machines are human labor intensive. Past ten or twelve we should really build a fabricator for the fabricators.

  "We could do that at first, but it will delay everything a month, but then we'd reach the break-even point for investing in that sort of start-up within two months I think. We can build the new machines from harvested materials mostly. Some things like wire we still don't draw our own. Insulating the wire will actually be harder. But the bulk of them, ninety percent, can be local materials. The other ten percent won't be cheap," Mo warned.

  "We are not like the French, desperate for a deal to survive. Build in two stages as you outlined, and don't plan on capping the number of machines built until we discuss it further." Heather instructed him. She bit her lip and shook her head amazement. "Do you realize this may be half of Central's gross national product in just a few years?" The man didn't seem as excited as she'd have expected.

  "I hope so," Mo agreed. "I wouldn't bring something to you directly if it wasn't important news. But we have to get ahead of the French before they get sorted out and pay more attention to business than politics. We need to start production first, and do improvements so we have control of the markets and stay ahead of them in this game."

  "Yes, you need to talk to me right away if anything impedes this project," Heather insisted. "As you said, the products are all wealth, and we can use a lot of it ourselves, but I have to talk to Jeff and get him to recruit some expertise about selling them. I have no idea how much of these commodities can be absorbed by the Earth market. They're in an economic slump and some things like platinum group metals we could drive prices down, to our detriment. We may need to stockpile some things. It's going to be complicated."

  "I'm so glad you didn't ask me to do that," Mo said."It's bad enough Jeff thinks I'm an architect, without you pegging me for a commodities trader."

  "Oh Mo, you aren't a process engineer either, but you're doing fine with this aren't you? We all have to wear a lot of hats here."

  Chapter 10

  "I have an answer about James Weir's partners," Chen said. "It was mostly a matter of searching public records, but they were old records and it took some significant man hours to obtain. The one man is a native Brazilian, from a relatively poor family, but brilliant and did well in business. He has traveled extensively, but doesn't have strong ties to anywhere else. He's the older of the two, and if he didn't bankroll it he has the connections to do so.

  "The other fellow is born in Brazil of French parents. They have some family money too, but brought it with them. They hoped for more opportunity in Brazil and it looks like they found it. The grandparents are comfortable, and still living in France. I suspect they may have basic life extension therapy because they are uncommonly well for their age. He has visited, but the tie seems more familial than political. Neither are very active in Brazilian politics.

  "The thing with the bug, we just happened to have one chance connection to exploit or it would be a mystery. It belongs to the Bolivians."

  "Who?" Jeff asked, unbelieving. "The Japanese didn't have a clue. Do the Bolivians really have that advanced a domestic tech industry? Why wouldn't they buy Japanese or Korean?"

  "The Bolivians," Chen insisted. "You said it was crude. So that makes it all the more believable. I have firm information from one of our agents in Argentina that they've seen that sort of a robotic bug, and the agency they were penetrating would only have been of interest to the Bolivians."

  "So they are only inferring that indirectly," Jeff said.

  "It's a more than you got from the Japanese," Chen pointed out.

  "Why? Jeff asked. "What would the Bolivians do with it?"

  "I didn't ask. I'm no more conversant with the state of politics between South American countries than you are. I'm hoping you don't want a broad scale analysis, because I just lucked out to get that datum for you. I beg you, it would be a massive waste of resources to pursue this."

  "I agree," Jeff said. That made relief visibly spread on Chen's face. "The only thing I can think to do with this information is give it to James Weir. It's of interest to him. I don't see any way it can actually harm us, and it may ingratiate him to us in some small measure."

  "Wonderful," Chen said. "Let me know if it leads anywhere."

  * * *

  "Ah, you're still on Home," Jeff said with satisfaction when he tried James Weir's com code.

  "How do you know I didn't just have my calls forwarded?" James asked suspiciously.

  "No lag," Jeff said. "I have a hard time catching lunar lag, but LEO or the Earth is obvious."

  "I'm not used to thinking about that," Weir admitted. "What do you need?" he asked, not especially friendly. At least he didn't drop the call.

  Jeff explained about the bug. Even admitted the source fingered was by inference rather than any solid chain of evidence. "But it's the only thing I got back at all. I have no idea why and just a third party opinion of who. If that suggests anything to you or fits with what else you know I hope it's helpful. It meant nothing to me."

  "I know exactly why and precisely who," Weir said grinding his teeth. "I'm going to kill the son of a bitch, and I owe you one," he allowed. "Don't worry," he continued, seeing Jeff's shocked expression. "Researching you a bit more, I've had people tell me you have regrets for the things you've had to do. Let me assure you, no innocent people will be harmed by the information you shared."

  All Jeff could do was nod, shocked, before Weir disconnected.

  Jeff called Chen right back and shared the recording.

  "That's unbelievable he'd confess such intentions. The man was thoroughly caught up in his emotions. Normally I'd think he was betrayed by a love interest to be that angry, but the circumstances don't fit." Chen said, face distorted in concentration. Then his countenance smoothed back to normal. "I predict he has issues with a business partner. What he is working on is the only thing that could be so important to him."

  "That may be, but I didn't intend to incite him," Jeff said.

  Chen shrugged. "You didn't lie. Their issues are between them. You do want him to succeed, don't you? One might assume this unknown person wants to stop it. Any opposition, anything that challenges their security, may also remove it from your purview."

  "There's that," Jeff agreed. "I'd very much like to see him continue his work and hopefully confirm some other facets of his theory."

  "But you aren't interested in allying with him?"

  "It couldn't be just him. You can't do business with an Earthie and not everybody to whom he's connected. I'd be involved with his Brazilian partners. Almost certainly the Brazilian government, because that's how they do things down there. Nothing happens without government permission and usually some way to tax and take a cut of the action. And he's North American, which could be a complication even if he doesn't want it to be. If he does produce anything useful they will consider it theirs, just like the Chinese laid claim to my s
tep mum's work. They're all natural thieves," Jeff said.

  "You're harsh, but I can't say you're wrong," Chen said sadly.

  * * *

  "How odd," Jeff said reading his pad. "The North Americans have banned the exchange of bits as illegal securities. I'm not even sure how any got to North America."

  "People often end up with a few foreign bills and coins after their vacation or a business trip. But it's still regarded as money. This is just North America being snarky about you," April said.

  "You back them too," Jeff pointed out.

  "And Heather, and Irwin and his Private Bank for that matter, but we're not notorious," April said.

  "Their currency isn't doing that well," Jeff said, not commenting on his special status. "I'm sure it's a sore point. I'd just as soon not deal with the complication of them circulating on Earth, but you can't tell people where to take them. I can imagine people would chaff under the restriction of needing a hundred of them to redeem. Then some idiot will complain they are a fraud because he can't turn in any odd number he wants. If I have to weigh out gold to the nearest ten milligrams accurately and convey it, that destroys the utility of them completely. Even if I made a machine to dispense gold in such small fractions, maybe as wire, the time and accounting expense would ruin us."

  "You could make a teller machine to both validate the card and dispense the gold," April suggested. "No need to involve a human at all."

  Jeff scowled. "I could, but I don't want to," he admitted.

  When April didn't say anything he softened. "But I'll keep it in mind for when there are a lot of them in circulation and we don't even want to bother with a hundred at a time."

  "Better to do that than let them get away with a slur on your character," April told him, looking peeved. "That's why they called them securities instead of money. They are insinuating you may not redeem them. They damn well know who issues them."