A12 Who Can Own the Stars?

by Mackey Chandler

  What they had already done was sufficient banditry that Mr. Mast indicated he was going to organize a raid on the Olsens and remove them as a hazard to traveling one of the more important roads for their community. Eileen was worried about when this would happen. If they hadn’t moved against the family before the Spring Festival there would likely be some Olsens attending. They could hardly show up with Alice in tow. That would expose that they knew everything about their criminal intentions and might precipitate a fight right at the Festival.

  Vic calmly pointed out that there was no way to find out Mr. Mast’s intentions. The radio net would pass messages, but if you wanted a coded message passed you had to pass it to the radio manager ahead of time. They couldn’t do that snowed in. Vic seemed to have the ability to put things he couldn’t change out of mind until they resolved. Eileen wasn’t able to do that yet. She was quite a bit younger than him and it was a talent she had yet to acquire.

  If the roads cleared far enough ahead of the Festival to contact Mr. Mast then Vic would probably be called to go on the raid. If not, they might have to leave Alice with a house sitter and keep her presence with them secret. Alice wouldn’t be happy about that at all.

  * * *

  April was in command of Dionysus’ Chariot, the vessel that would land on the Martian field and load both their fee in artifacts for removing their excess personnel, and as many of the unwanted Martians as could jam in their freight hold. Heather’s man Johnson was her copilot. He was only recently certified for landers, but had a year of orbit to orbit qualification. Indeed, he had yet to be qualified on the jump capable ship, but it would be worth the trouble train him in her estimation. He was eager as well and considered it another adventure. April didn’t pick him for his experience but because he was fearless and unflappable. His reputation in that regard dated clear back to driving rovers when Central was established. She didn’t want anyone safe and timid sitting beside her when things might go bad and require decisive responses.

  Once they landed, the pilots would have to stay at their boards for security. April recruited her bodyguard Gunny Mack Tindal and fellow security pro Christian Mackay to deal with the Martians on their landing field, keeping them safe while loading their cargo and passengers. They rushed to join the team on the Moon from Home.

  Jeff was in command of the exploration ship Hringhorni, that wasn’t capable of safely landing in Martian gravity. It would maintain an armed overwatch on the loading. He had Deloris, their most experienced pilot, sitting as his second.

  “Who decided this arrangement?” Heather demanded when told their plans.

  “I asked Jeff to do it that way,” April said.

  “Why?” she pushed, uncomfortable now with what she’d started. Heather didn’t like either of them landing, yet saw the necessity of it. There are some things you should do yourself rather than trust to hirelings.

  “Well, the whole idea is if they try to take our ship the attending vessel will reduce their complex to vapor. Jeff and I were talking it over and decided if that happened, we should also take out all their buildings at the alien wreck site, being careful not to destroy the ship itself,” April revealed.

  “Why did you tack that on?” Heather asked.

  “Jeff pointed out that they are basically a cult. They assume humanity will go crazy and act stupidly if they reveal there are aliens. He provided me with some examples of cults that engaged in self-destructive acts when they experienced outside intervention. He was afraid they’d try to destroy the wreck and cover up its existence. If they try to fool us on this pickup there’s no safe way to engage with them further. Indeed, those out at the wreck are the worst of the true believers. They made it clear that the ones we are picking up have never been inducted into their secrets.”

  “OK, I can see that,” Heather agreed, “but back to the first question. Why are you assigned the landing and Jeff is the one above threatening to destroy the site?”

  “Look at it this way. Which one of us do you think the Martians are more likely to believe would pull the trigger on destroying them and maybe our own ship?”

  “Oh, the Butcher of Jiuquan for sure. I’m with you on that now,” Heather agreed.

  * * *

  “Do you know?” Irwin asked his right-hand man, Dan Prescott. “When the North Americans arrested me and April forced them to release me, only to have the Europeans arrest me next, I figured my whole fundraising project was doomed.

  “I was absolutely sure it needed my face to face presence to close the sort of deals that no executive would want to do over video com. I only reluctantly gave up doing it that way because it finally became obvious it isn’t safe for a Spacer to visit Earth anymore.

  “What I had no idea about, absolutely zero clue, was that many of the executives open to investing in a space venture harbored a secret desire to visit the habitats or the Moon themselves.”

  “As long as the corporation is paying for the ticket and accommodations,” Dan said.

  “Well sure, but that’s always been true,” Irwin said. “Corporations didn’t schedule meetings in Hawaii because of its central location and cheap room rates. Business meetings were always a way to have a nice vacation on the company tab. Of course, rebelling from North America and being sanctioned finished off their tourist industry. The truth of the matter is that the tourist trade was already in a sustained decline with the mainland economy cratering. Their rebellion would have never taken off if tourism had remained strong and jobs plentiful. Lots of people, even some island-born, had already gone to the mainland to survive.”

  “I’ve only seen six or seven people come in the bank to discuss Beta with you. Are there others of whom I’m not aware?” Dan wondered.

  “No, but those few have been quite sufficient to add substantial funding. The people who came up have multi-billion-dollar discretionary funds. Indeed, it has turned out to be an excellent filter to determine who is worth cultivating as investors. The lady from the State Bank of Germany was able to transfer euromarks to Russia and have them send us a mix of platinum and gold. The Australian Central bank was able to deliver gold directly. I got a very nice deal from Iceland that they paid in heavy water, and a Japanese bank bought in that I suspect was fronting for a Canadian bank.”

  Don looked amused. “They weren’t put off by how cramped everything is and that they won’t find a wine list with hundreds of choices in the clubs?”

  “I took the German lady to the Quiet Retreat the first evening she was here. The next morning she went to the cafeteria on her own for breakfast. That evening she insisted on going back to the cafeteria and turned down being my guest at the Fox and Hare. She then decided to go on to the Moon because she expected Home to be the wild frontier and was a little disappointed how civilized it turned out to be. She heard the Moon is much rougher and less ‘touristy’ so she went there to experience it.”

  “She’s probably the sort of eco-tourist who pays to go sleep in a yurt and ride a pony around back home,” Dan said. “I’ll take a soft adjustable bed and room service any day.”

  “Indeed. If you get brave, Cuba was a wonderful place to visit,” Irwin said.

  “No thank you. Your experience getting thrown in jail twice in two jurisdictions didn’t do a lot to promote the Earthie tourist trade to me,” Dan said.

  “Yes, well I’m not saying I’ll never go down again. But a lot would have to change, and I think I would make it a single destination visit, staying in a country where I can take a shuttle there directly and leave the same way.”

  “Tonga possibly,” Dan allowed. “Australia or Hawaii… maybe,” he allowed.

  “Jeff does occasional cargo runs to Hawaii,” Irwin pointed out. “I’m pretty sure he’d take passengers.”

  “Things there aren’t settled enough for me, yet,” Dan said. “By the time they are I may have other choices, Texas even.”

  Irwin raised his eyebrows at that. It didn’t seem very likely to him.

&nbs
p; * * *

  “Mo, how are things going for Dr. Holbrook’s new lab?” Heather asked via com. “Does he have at least one room ready to safely house an object?”

  Mo looked a bit ragged. Heather hoped he wasn’t getting sick. With little physical traffic between Central and Armstrong, they didn’t import much disease. They had mandatory touch-pads that checked for organisms now at the entries. They had even less physical contact with Earth through Armstrong or Home, which was just fine with her. Earth was a Petri dish.

  “He has two of the labs that can safely store your artifacts, but they have a ways to go to be equipped to actually study them. I have a foreman in place supervising and just read his end of the day summary, but it seems to be going smoothly. I’m trying to make sure all my projects are capable of being run if I’m not available,” Mo said.

  Heather felt a jolt of alarm and looked at Mo closer. She depended on him heavily.

  “Mo, are you sick? Have I been piling too much work on you? If you need some care or I need to make some adjustments, speak up. I sort of assumed I can just keep piling the load on and people will tell me when it simply is impossible to do.”

  “The work is not a problem. I love the work. I’m not one of those people who can’t delegate and has to micromanage everything. I’m just not sure I can live on the same planet with my ex.”

  Heather decided this was probably not the time to debate which were moons versus planetary bodies.

  “I told her she can’t work in the same areas you commonly do,” Heather remembered. “She was forbidden from actually beating on your door to demand you speak to her. I distinctly remember telling her not to use chance meetings like at the cafeteria to harass you with unscheduled meetings when you are just trying to enjoy dinner. I think I only left her text messages as a way to contact you.”

  “Yes, and I don’t feel I can complain about that. We do have children in common and our finances and history are forever entwined. But she tends to leave me forty or fifty text messages a day. She also tends to go on and on repeating things for emphasis and telling me how she feels about the issues she brings up. I don’t have time to read that many messages and understand them. Especially when I can read some of them two or three times and still not understand her point or what, if anything, she wants me to do.”

  “I should have said the text privilege had to be used reasonably,” Heather said.

  Mo shook his head emphatically.

  “You’d have to define ‘reasonable’ and I doubt you could do so in a way she would understand. She has all these feelings but no gut feeling at all for where the limits of reasonableness are. Even if you defined specific metrics. If you said she must not send more than six messages a day they would all six become novellas. Trying to define anything as abstract as purposefulness would be pointless. She just doesn’t think that way. And I doubt it is something you can teach an adult whose mindset is so far from it.”

  “She’s mentally ill, isn’t she?” Heather said. “Why didn’t I see that?”

  “I doubt you could find a psychologist willing to say she is clinically deranged. If she is, then they’d have to define a huge chunk of the population as insane. She doesn’t have visual or auditory hallucinations, as far as I know. She doesn’t present with odd facial tics or repetitive or compulsive gestures. She doesn’t even have wide mood swings with manic days and down days. Socially, she presents so well to others that anyone who deals with her on a day to day basis would be surprised I have any problem with her. If they didn’t know me, it would be entirely reasonable for them to believe I must be the problem in our relationship, because she treats them just fine. Yet for all of that, we do not inhabit the same reality at all.”

  “Just to help me understand, what can she possibly need to speak to you about, forty or fifty times a day?” Heather had a sudden insight. “And how can she possibly do a job and take care of all the things in her own life while composing and sending you that many messages a day?”

  “Here, please, take a look,” Mo invited. He opened his phone to Linda’s messages scrolled back and forwarded the last week of them to her. “Start with a week ago or just jump in the middle anywhere if you don’t want to read that much. You’ll see.”

  Heather looked at the icon that appeared on her screen. “You’re sure you want me to see this private stuff? It isn’t betraying any confidence with her?” Heather asked.

  “I’ve never been told any of it is confidential or was sworn to secrecy. Look please,” Mo pleaded.

  Heather meant to read a sentence or two. It was five minutes before she looked up and said, “Oh wow. I’m still on the first day.” She shook her head and continued to read.

  “I didn’t expect this. It’s mostly about your kids, not you. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone use the word nefarious in casual speech.”

  “She took a minor in literature,” Mo said.

  “And giving you a separate work number would be meaningless,” Heather said, thinking aloud.

  “You’re starting to understand. If I go back to Home, I’d block her entirely on a new phone.”

  “Why have you put up with this?” Heather asked.

  “Out of respect for your judgment and the fact it would be entirely proper for her to contact me about reasonable concerns with our children,” Mo said.

  “My judgment obviously stinks and isn’t working,” Heather said. “It seems to me both your children are effectively emancipated and with good mentors, even if Eric hasn’t had his majority voted. She seems to feel he makes too much money. Why is that a complaint?”

  “Eric refuses to detail what he does to her, so she assumes it must be illicit. He assumes she would interfere with his businesses, and I think he’s right. He’s involved in some things like a lottery, I know she would disapprove. But it isn’t illegal on Home.”

  “Nothing much is,” Heather acknowledged. “I can almost sympathize with that. I came very close to outlawing gambling in my kingdom. The compulsive gambling mindset is as bad as any other addiction. But April and Jeff keep reminding me you can’t legislate morality. Not successfully anyhow.”

  “Lindsey is doing fine too,” Mo said. “She has work she enjoys and it sells very well. Linda never respected it until she found out how much money it was worth. Then she tried to steal it. But she still has her mom blocked on her phone and that really rankles Linda.”

  Heather thought about it a little. Mo stared right back at her on the screen. He wasn’t the sort to try to sneak a peek at other things if you didn’t keep babbling. He had too much respect for her.

  “It wouldn’t do a thing to go back to Home,” Heather decided. “She followed you here. She’d just follow you right back to Home,” she predicted.

  Mo looked distressed, but he didn’t contradict her at all.

  “I’m going to expel her,” Heather decided. “She’s damaging you. She’s damaging me and everyone else who depends on you and that’s a lot of us.”

  “I haven’t brought a complaint,” Mo pointed out.

  “You don’t have to,” Heather assured him. “I’m the complainant, even if you are the principal damaged party. You have been entirely too nice about this for too long.”

  “May I come to your court?” Mo requested. “Linda will feel this is from me no matter what you say. I’d rather be there and let her have her say if she wants to chastise me. If I don’t, she’ll assume I’m hiding and afraid to confront her. If I’m not there, she will slander me over it forever wherever she goes. She’ll probably start couriering me physical notes.”

  “Of course, my court is always open to the public. I’ll serve her notice to appear this Sunday,” Heather said.

  Chapter 2

  Phobos was used as a natural space station by the Martians. They’d even mounted an ion drive to convert loose surface debris to reaction mass to stop its slow orbital decay. The original transport ship built by the European Union was the Sandman. It was an orbit to orbit deep
space vehicle only, dedicated to the Martian run. Indeed, its Delta V and the endurance of its environmental systems were so design specific it would be cheaper to build new than to try to alter it to visit any other body in the Solar System. It was totally incapable of being altered to be a lander.

  Upon declaring their independence, the Martians quickly militarized Phobos by installing improvised weaponry. Any invasion from Earth would have to stage through the moon unless they carried their own landing shuttles to Mars. With the present technology that was a burden that made it much more difficult to attempt a Martian invasion. It wasn’t any exotic system guarding Phobos, just a couple large shotgun analogs. That was quite sufficient to guard against the current generation of interplanetary ships.

  Dionysus’ Chariot had no need of Phobos to dock or drop to the Martian surface. Nevertheless, both the ships appeared near the moon and painted it with their separate radars. Jeff and April didn’t want anyone to doubt there really was a second ship in orbit watching over their lander, not just a bluff.

  “Phobos Control, this is the armed merchant Dionysus’ Chariot. We are proceeding to a landing at your surface facility. Please hold any traffic with the field while we are engaged in picking up passengers. Our sister ship, the explorer Hringhorni is going to assume an areostationary orbit to watch over our landing. They are charged to destroy any inbound traffic while we are on the ground. If there is any attempt to capture our ship, they are also charged with the duty of destroying the vessel to prevent its capture. That would of necessity include all surface installation in its vicinity. Please tightly control any movements that might be misunderstood,” April requested.

  “Dionysus’ Chariot, we were advised to expect your arrival and no shuttle traffic is presently in Mars orbit or scheduled to descend to the surface for two days. You are free to safely maneuver as you will. Dirtside is advised by relay satellite that you have arrived and will be descending.”