A Sudden Departure (April Book 9)

by Mackey Chandler

  April ordered for them. Grilled buns, medium rare with light Montreal steak seasoning, double sharp cheese, and a basket of seasoned garlic fries, each. Nothing else, April insisted. He could get mushrooms or olives or whatever another time if he found it lacking.

  "Well?" April asked after one bite.

  "Now how can I possibly form an opinion on one bite," Jeff objected. He took a second bite, and chewed thoughtfully.

  "This," he admitted after the second, "does not even resemble a cheeseburger from the cafeteria."

  "Told you."

  "Next time you pay," Cheesy insisted. Jeff slid a few bits in the tip canister when he was turned away cooking.

  * * *

  "Hello Dears," Heather said from the com screen.

  "Are you going to come see us again?" April asked hopefully.

  "Soon, I have just a few things to handle and I can take a couple days off, but I had the oddest second-hand offer I thought you should know about. Indeed, I'd like you to advise me."

  "But of course. We'll share the blame," Jeff offered gallantly.

  "Something like that," April offered less enthusiastically.

  "The French, having sold that very nice separation technology to us for a bowl of stew, now want to know what we are bothering to keep and stockpile. I told the nice gentlemen that we weren't born yesterday. I'm not going to provide details of our operation so they can low ball the bid on the portion they wish to buy.

  "He claimed not to have the authority to tell me, which isn't like him at all. The gentleman is usually quite self-important. So I invited him to call me back when he could. It must have been a difficult condition, because it took him three days to get back to me. Do you want to guess what they want?" Heather invited.

  "Helium 3," Jeff said. "You're right. It's from his customer who doesn't want to deal with you directly."

  "Should that hurt my feelings?" Heather asked.

  "In business you can't afford to have any feelings," Jeff said. "But this will have more political implications than just financial consequences."

  "Exactly my thought and concern. I believe at one time you expressed a desire to save the He3 we got sorted out from regolith. Is that still a concern? I've admitted we have been separating it, but I have not committed to supply it."

  "Oddly enough, no. I probably should have said something about that when it changed. My bad," Jeff apologized. "Eventually it would have still been nice to have the use of it, but it is no longer a necessity. Now I have some really conflicted feelings about it."

  "Why Dear?"

  "Because we no longer need it as badly, but I believe they do. If you don't supply what you mine it may be an inconvenience, but like anything they must have, they will do whatever they need to do, and spend as much as is within their ability, to get it."

  "But they won't spend it with me," Heather pointed out.

  "They're offering a tempting deal?" Jeff asked.

  "Not at first. They were offering eight hundred North American Dollars a liter standard P and T. I pointed out we have quite a bit of agricultural by-product now and increasing, so we now can produce our own sani-wipes and don't have to import them. He seemed hurt by that."

  "So that's their customer?" April asked. "North America?"

  Heather spread her hands, uncertain. "I'm not sure it's safe to assume that. They may be sneaky enough to offer dollars to throw us off, or they might just have been stuck with a lot of dollars and want to dump them. I suggested instead they trade copper or silver since both are lacking in the moon compared to our uses for them. He seemed horrified at that, but when I suggested gold as an alternative it made the copper and silver seem a better idea after all. But he again claimed need to ask instructions on what payment is possible, so I'm waiting again."

  "There's another advantage besides the pay," Jeff said. "We were accused of plotting to make the same sort of vehicle James Weir did. If we sell off our Helium 3 that lifts the cloud of suspicion from us. And if anyone thought they were racing us to build a Helium 3 powered ship, that will reassure them."

  "I like it," Heather said. "This may work out well for everyone."

  "I wonder," April said frowning.

  "Yes?" Heather prompted her.

  "Are the French devious enough to have sold you the tech to get another source of He3? If you weren't saving it would they have suggested you start doing so for them, before you got a lot of units deployed and the design locked in?"

  "Perhaps someone else behind the scenes. I don't think Monsieur Poincaré who I'm dealing with is that bright. We'll probably never know now," Heather said. "It's too late to deny stockpiling it after we're to the stage of negotiating a price."

  "You might as well make money off it while you can," Jeff said. "It's temporary anyway."

  "How so?" Heather asked.

  "You and the French, and anyone else they can get in the act can supply enough for their research, and maybe limited runs for one starshp, but to supply a fleet of vessels? There will never be enough regolith processed for that. I haven't run the numbers, but I'd also bet there isn't enough money in just the Helium 3 unless you are mining the other stuff too."

  "If they have need of a lot of Helium 3 to run a star faring civilization, where will they get it?" Heather asked.

  "The only natural terrestrial source is to separate it from natural gas," Jeff said. But the ratio of He3 to He4 is very poor. It's overwhelmed by all the He4 from the alpha emissions of radioactive elements. It's in the Earth's atmosphere of course, but in too low a concentration to mine. Getting it from both those sources takes more energy than it yields. Bombarding lithium with neutrons likewise will never produce the volumes they need.

  "Unless somebody comes up with new tech, the only source is to mine the atmospheres of gas giants. That's going to take some interesting engineering too. Deuterium will be easier to mine, but we're not where we need to be yet to do that."

  "Think on it," April urged him. "If we can figure out how to mine gas giants before they do maybe we can capture that market too. Maybe we can float extraction devices in the atmosphere and recover them after they extract enough fuel and are filled up."

  "You're a bit greedy, aren't you?" Jeff asked. "I like that in you." He didn't want to tell her how far away he was from being able to float a balloon on Jupiter or Saturn.

  "More to the point, Heather suggested, "if we could be the source of fuel from gas giants we'd have a handle on both their exploration and trade. If they get too frisky with us we could shut them down in short order. But that will only work if they don't know the ultimate source of their fuel. That also limits how greedy we can be. We have to be cheap enough and reliable enough they won't urgently push to get their own sources, or even stockpile fuel against the possibility of being cut off."

  Jeff looked thoughtful, but didn't reject the idea. "None of that will work if our names are attached to the project. Even as peripheral investors. It has to be undercover from this moment, from the very start. I know I don't have the skills to build a front company and operate it so nobody can figure out it's true nature, but I believe Chen is probably devious enough to run something like that. It seems just the sort of thing a master spy could do. Certainly a very tiny fraction of the cash flow would be more than everything I'm able to pay him right now. That's all assuming I can figure out how to make the mining work. But I'll ask him to be thinking on the problem, and how he'd do it."

  Heather slowly got a wicked smile. "They would just croak if they understood their payments to us will be helping us build a much better star ship."

  "Well yeah," April agreed. "Even at this initial level of support we're talking about, paying us for Helium 3 from regolith extraction."

  "I'm not sure there isn't somebody behind the scenes fully aware of what's happening," Jeff said. "They did after all hush up that news release. But what other choices do they have? They don't have any alternative path to the stars right now so they will deal with the Devil if t
hey must to move forward."

  "Indeed," April agreed, "and may I say, you look quite fetching in horns, sir."

  Heather started giggling at that. Jeff just shrugged.

  "They already think that of me. There's no fighting their ability to paint me that way, so it's the sort of thing you either ignore or embrace fully and wear as a badge of honor."

  Chapter 29

  When Jeff said it was time for his pilot to come get some familiarization with the control systems of the Hringhorni at Home, it was totally unexpected that Heather would say, "No," so sternly. He'd seen that look before. There wasn't any room for discussion.

  She must have seen his dismay, because she explained.

  "It's bad enough you're stealing my workers away. We're scrambling to recruit people with the same range of skills. The least you can do is let them do their jobs here as long as possible."

  So Jeff set up their flight simulator on the moon. It didn't turn out to be that difficult with Heather's cooperation. In the end it was easier than it would have been at Home. If felt weird to have Heather assign him a room bigger than his office on Home without displacing someone or even asking rent. She just waved it away when he offered.

  Jeff brought a couple ship computers from Dave's shop and borrowed four big screens to simulate the ports. The control screens were the actual ones they intended to use in their ship.

  He and Deloris were sitting in delicate web chairs built for lunar gravity instead of real acceleration couches with Singh compensators hanging where they could swing in over them. They couldn't simulate the acceleration anyway. Well, he could, but couldn't spare the time and materials. The big thing was he had the programs and what data they'd had managed to gather from test flights with the Chariot.

  When they darkened the room it was quite realistic. Deloris even insisted on wearing a pressure suit. If that helped her psychologically that was fine with Jeff. Alice was working, but Barak was off shift and more than just interested. They intended to cross train him to be tested and licensed when jump pilot became a publicly known specialty. So he sat the right seat.

  Jeff sat behind, and provided traffic control responses. It felt natural, and they bantered about things the same as any crew on a real mission would. Both Deloris and Barak wanted to know details of the ship construction and the way the company was dealing with the Earthies and French moon colony. Jeff was happy to talk about it. The three partners who made up Singh Industries, didn't operate with complex layers of secrecy. They might hold you out of a project. But once you were in you were all the way in. A lot of workers didn't know there was going to be a starship, but once they knew their coworkers didn't have to expend time and energy determining how much each one could know.

  They soon knew about the deal pending with the French over processing regolith. They understood that such a source of Helium 3 would not suffice long term. Deloris expressed the idea that France not North America might have been the agent behind both the tech and the mining of the regolith, but that their colony's sudden demands for independence might have disrupted the program, or at least its timetable.

  That seemed such a reasonable supposition that Jeff made a note of it on his pad to discuss it with April and Heather. Sharing the details of your program with subordinates risked total catastrophe if one of them turned, but their people were a smaller group, much more tightly aligned politically than any Earth nation with all their factions. On the plus side, sharing it brought in much wider sources of ideas and solutions than limiting important secrets to a tiny core group.

  "That idea of April's to float things in Jupiter's atmosphere and recover them sounds pretty tough to do," Barak said, just as Jeff already thought. "Even finding them later. The radio noise and radiation around Jupiter is crazy, and we don't understand Jovian weather very well. It makes more sense to scoop it in a ram sort of a robot vehicle and compress it. But how much can you compress and lift back out? Unless you could process it on the fly."

  "The French device will separate isotopes as well as distinct elements," Jeff said. "But it's so slow. I don't see any way to speed it up."

  "How do they separate uranium for fission bombs?" Barak asked. "The fissile isotope is only like a percent or two isn't it?"

  "A bit less than a percent," Jeff confirmed. "They mostly ionize a beam of uranium vapor in a vacuum with a carefully tuned laser, and separate it electrostatically now. The Israelis perfected that last century. Way back, in the 1940s, they used to make a gaseous compound of uranium and separate it in centrifuges. You can do the same thing squirting it into a vortex chamber. It was horribly expensive and the difference in weight between U 235 and U 238 is so small the enrichment in each stage was small. And the gas is nasty and corrosive."

  "So you need to separate out the helium and then separate your isotopes?" Barak asked. "You couldn't separate one isotope out of a mix straight from the atmosphere? Because the difference in mass of He3 vs He4 is pretty big, not like uranium."

  "You can only spin a centrifuge up so fast or it flies apart. You can only build up pressure so far to squirt it in a vortex chamber. You'll start having problems with the flow going transonic and generating shock waves there too," Jeff said.

  "How many G's acceleration on the inside surface of a good centrifuge?" Barak asked.

  When Jeff didn't say anything for a long while Barak looked over his shoulder. Jeff was staring at him, eyes bugged out, mouth slightly open. He looked stricken, his face contorted in a pattern Barak didn't understand.

  "Are you well, Jeff?" Barak asked. He'd never been around anyone having a heart attack or a stroke. But he was starting to suspect Jeff was having a medical emergency.

  Jeff seemed to have trouble considering the question, but then managed to focus on Barak, closed his mouth and made a negating motion, waving his hand. That changed into a single digit that was the common gesture for – just a minute.

  Barak looked at Deloris. She was continuing with her training exercise no matter what. It was that real to her. Maybe she thought Jeff was trying to fake them out with a simulated emergency.

  "Go ahead," Jeff said, after a pause. "I have to think."

  They didn't need him to fill in as a controller, so that didn't disrupt the training run. But neither was Barak following what Deloris was doing anymore. When Barak looked back again Jeff was leaning forward with his hands steepled over his nose, and his eyes closed. Barak couldn't even tell if he was breathing. But if he lost consciousness he couldn't hold his hands up like that.

  After awhile he did drop his hands, looking perfectly normal, and said, "OK, where are we?" It was a rhetorical question. He would figure out where they were in the exercise faster than they could tell him, as soon as he looked at the screens. But it was just his way of telling them he was fully back with them in his consciousness.

  "April said you flip out sometimes," Barak said. "It's kind of scary to see."

  "You've done it to me before," Jeff said. The tone was accusing.

  "Done what?"

  "Triggered me into looking at reality from a completely different perspective. You did it when you told me how to start a plasma engine sitting on the Earth's surface, and jolted me pretty bad when you suggested pushing M3 out past the moon. Though you weren't there to see that one. I was boggled both times."

  "What did it this time?" Barak asked, looking confused.

  "You said Gs when talking about a centrifuge. I'm not used to thinking of it in those terms. We get so used to our own comfortable frame of reference," Jeff said, making the sides of an imaginary little box with his hands. Then he sighed.

  "I have a powerful tool able to directly create a gravitational gradient that can separate isotopes much better than a centrifuge. I just didn't think to apply it."

  Barak looked like he was going to speak and Jeff pointed a finger at him.

  "If you say it's obvious I'm going to come over there and smack you."

  Barak held his palms up, suing for peace.


  "You jolted me into a whole cascade of ideas this time. I can see a drone dipping into a gas giant and scooping gas," Jess said with a swoop of his hand. "It will pass through a slot with a tremendous gravitation gradient in a shaped gap and most of it will be vented right back outside. Then the lighter elements stratified until the hydrogen and helium remain. That second waste volume will be diverted back outside and the hydrogen and helium sorted right down to the isotopes if you wish. One last stage will then be exhausted back outside and only the one or two final portions we want captured."

  "Ah, it's a continuous flow process," Barak said, nodding. "That's always better than any batch system."

  "While you two were totally breaking the sim I arrived and am in orbit around Saturn," Deloris told them, waving at the image out the fake forward ports. "You can look at the recording if you want to see how it went. It was as boring as white rice with no toppings. But that's how a mission is supposed to be."

  "I will review it, fast-forwarded," Jeff promised. "And the next one we do I'll try to fully attend. . . mentally."

  "I'll just keep my mouth shut," Barak promised.

  "No, really. It's worth breaking routine when you give me an idea like this," Jeff said.

  "Unless it's not a sim and you kill us all," Deloris said, critically.

  "Yes ma'am," Jeff agreed. "You will be in command. You can call us on it."

  That got a sharp nod of approval from her, despite her wary look.

  * * *

  "Are you happy with your crew and trials?" April asked when Jeff returned to Home.

  "Yes, and I believe Barak gave me an insight to be able to mine fuel not just for local commerce but traveling deep among the stars, without setting up a mining operation and waiting for it to be productive, at each stop along the way."