A12 Who Can Own the Stars?

by Mackey Chandler

  She still got texts and calls that were for the most part edited out by her com program. Sometimes she got physical mail that almost nobody used. Home didn’t have a postal system and the few hundred pieces a year were forwarded as charity work by UPS. If their on-station clerk could figure out the recipient, he’d drop you a com message when he got around to it. If he couldn’t, it all went in a bin anyone was welcome to paw through. When the bin got full it was donated to Central for carbon recovery.

  Despite those negative feelings, when April called Joel Durand, he always got a big grin that made her feel good. He managed to be a fan without being creepy or scary.

  “Joel, you should look into the possibility you have a leak,” April warned him.

  Joel looked alarmed and leaned over first one side and then the other looking down each side and under him. “I don’t see any,” he said with relief.

  April couldn’t help laughing.

  “I’m sure Mylène would never allow you in public in that condition. I’m speaking of your intelligence agencies or whatever scientific community you have working on star flight.”

  “Ah, well those things happen. Have you been doing a little friendly volunteer pentesting?”

  “I’d never do that without your explicit request. I don’t think my guys would do that to anybody they know I consider friendly. They do have a history of outright espionage, not just security work, so they probably have the capacity or know where to hire it done. I’ve ordered them to refrain from aggressive behavior towards some other people, but I’ll add France. If they want to crack every rotten secret in China and North America and publish it for the fun of it, I have no problem with that at all.”

  “Ah, then you are inferring we are the source rather than direct knowledge,” Joel said. “We of course suspected that when someone started competing with us for the needed materials.”

  “Yes, well, the North Americans are assembling a ship in orbit. They have a manned facility at the geosynchronous level. In my opinion, it has to be a starship. So far, they have three modules assembled that they lofted with heavy lifters.

  “I can’t imagine they can make a larger, heavier ship function without the fuel process you intimated exists. Indeed, they must have made some improvements in performance to be able to drive this vehicle. Either they came up with it independently or stole it from you. Jeff insists that inventions and processes happen when the underlying art supports them, but I find this too much of a coincidence. I think they stole it.”

  Joel showed her his poker face. “Do you have some confirmation of this? Perhaps a shipping manifest or other documents?”

  “We’re watching them assemble it in real-time. Here, I’ll send you a short segment and you can cut a still from it,” She chopped a ten-second segment from her feed, and then reconsidered, zooming in to the full 150x limit of the camera and adding it on to the wide-field shot. That showed just one end of the vessel and a space-suited worker in such detail you could make out he had some sort of tool in his hand.

  Joel blinked. “I don’t suppose you can zoom in a little closer so we can use facial recognition,” he quipped.

  “No this is using third party hardware, not our own,” April said blandly.

  “Might one inquire how Chen discovered this project?”

  “Oh, well, Chen didn’t discover it. I keep more than one network for gathering information. You have to,” April assured him. “I told him.”

  Joel forced himself not to check his veracity software. April would instantly interpret the shift of his eyes, and he was pretty sure what it would show anyway.

  “But I did tell Chen to gather more information on it for me. You might do the same to your intelligence people. I find it keeps them a little more respectful if you drop something on them from time to time to which they were totally oblivious.”

  “Yes, I imagine it does, Joel granted. “Since this is an arch-enemy or at least a peer of China, do you have some response to recommend?”

  “No, you’ve been acting as if we have an informal alliance for intelligence. I’m just honoring that as long as you do too. I may not reveal other things that I don’t think impact France. I’d rather not make it a formal commitment covering my partners. My fellow, Chen, suggested that the reasonable thing to do would be to seek their improvements as your own. He assures me that Earth intelligence networks leak like a sieve, and explained why in some detail. There are lots of things I’d rather not trust to such leaky vessels.”

  “Did you assign him discovering those refinements too?” Joel wondered.

  “No, we don’t need them. But Chen and his peer, who I don’t think I have named to France, do assignments for others as they wish if you want to offer him the puzzle. It keeps the cost of their services reasonable to allow that. Here’s his business com code,” April said, boxing it on the screen. “I’ll warn you, they are very dear if you should decide to try them.”

  “How do you resolve any conflicts of interest?” Joel asked amazed. “I can’t imagine having agents who aren’t exclusive to our service.”

  “I have to trust him for so much. That seems like a minor matter to trust him to not accept work that creates conflicts. Plus, he knows I’d shoot him dead if he betrayed us.”

  “I doubt I could convince my man of that,” Joel admitted. “May I reveal this video to my people? It won’t compromise anyone?”

  “Oh sure. They’re doing it out in the open, in front of God and everybody,” April said with an expansive gesture. “There’s no way to hide it in geosynchronous orbit. If they had to build a hanger or tent to build it inside, it would probably add half again the expense, and how do you hide what the big modules you are taking inside are? It’s like making a cake while somebody watches and then trying to say your recipe is a secret.”

  “Thank you. If my people find anything related, we’ll share it,” Joel promised.

  “Great, talk to you soon then,” April said and disconnected.

  Joel reviewed the conversation carefully. Running it through veracity software didn’t tell him a thing. He was depressed to see his side of the conversation had a wider range of probable truthfulness than April’s. For the first time, he wondered if the Spacers had software that defeated the truth extracting programs. It would be difficult to alter one’s facial tensions, pupil dilation, and the pace and tenor of the voice in real-time to seem more truthful. He suspected she just told the truth. It seemed almost a cheat. If he carefully composed his statements ahead of time, perhaps he could improve his test range. He’d try it with his intelligence service.

  Talking with the lag to Home was mentally tiring and he needed to recover from that. He got up and walked around, used his private bath, and ordered a pot of tea brought in before he called his top intelligence officer.

  “Bernard,” he greeted his man on the screen, I have something I’d like you to look into.”

  “Your wish is my command,” Bernie said.

  “I think you just crashed my veracity program,” Joel joked.

  “You’ve always been skeptical of them anyway,” he pointed out.

  “True,” Joel agreed, which was probably the highest score he’d get on one word. “The North Americans are building a vessel in orbit, which I suspect is a starship. I’d like you to find out if they have any significant improvements and if they acquired our fueling process.”

  “Where in orbit?” Bernard asked frowning.

  “In a geosynchronous orbit. I didn’t think to ask where, but I’d imagine parked somewhere over North America. How many manned facilities can they have that far out?” Joel asked.

  “Two,” Bernie answered. That was a measure of how badly he was rattled. He never volunteered something like that unless asked specifically.

  “There you go. Which one should be obvious,” Joel predicted.

  Bernard keyed in something furiously and scowled at Joel.

  “That didn’t come up from below me, bypassing me. There’s not
hing in the system with the proper keywords,” he accused.

  “No, it’s from another source. One should never risk a single point of failure for intelligence. I appreciate your work but have other sources too.”

  There, that should be nearly as clean a statement as any April made to him.

  “Would you accept something of critical importance from a single source?” he asked Bernard.

  “I won’t accept a single source without verification even if I’m the primary source.”

  “Just so,” Joel said satisfied.

  “Do you have any specific data you feel free to share?” Bernie asked skeptically.

  “Here, I’ll give you a video snip. This is about twenty minutes old,” Joel said.

  When the scene zoomed in, Bernard reacted so hard that the veracity software reported agitation even in the absence of speech.

  “So, I take it you knew they were North American by matching retinal patterns?” He asked, looking at the zoomed-in image.

  “It is a good image, isn’t it?” Joel asked, thoroughly enjoying this. “Be a good fellow, and let me know how this is going in a few days,” Joel requested. He knew Bernie would bust his derriere to have something new well before that.

  * * *

  Vic was slowly eating his cornbread. Taking tiny bites and chewing it thoroughly. A friend taught him that satisfied hunger better when you didn’t have much, a trick the man knew from jail. He’d buy a candy bar and eat it that way instead of jail slop. The wind was near still, as it often is near sunset. Vic heard a distant sound that was mechanical. It alerted him all the more for how seldom they heard anything powered now.

  He was sitting on a folded-up space blanket, being careful of ticks, but he jumped up and unfolded that, wrapping himself in it with it over his head as a hood. He wasn’t sure if the hum he heard was a truck or a plane.

  Far down the state highway, the way they’d come, where it crossed a saddle and started a long downhill, the dark dot of a vehicle appeared. Vic didn’t wait to see what it was. He hurried back and ordered Eileen and Alice into his hammock together. Telling them a vehicle was coming.

  “Why yours instead of my own?” Alice asked.

  “My rain fly has foil on the inside. I didn’t buy them all that way because it was expensive. Stay there until I come to give you an all-clear.”

  Vic grabbed his binoculars and went back to the overlook, but not as near the edge as before. He tugged the blanket to make a deeper hood and hunkered down.

  The vehicle resolved to a scout car. The sort that looked like an off-road racer. There was another behind it keeping a couple of hundred meters separation. Vic wasn’t as worried about them seeing him from the scout car as the fact they often ran drones ahead as they went down the road. He didn’t see or hear one, but they could be small and quiet. In fact, the scout cars themselves were pretty quiet. They were likely fuel cell powered instead of IC engines. He’d heard tire noise rather than exhaust.

  The scout cars pulled off the road as far as possible on the county road corners of the T. The other side dropped off too sharply. Vic was dismayed to see the men rig a camo net over each. That suggested they would be there for some time. They might even be an advance element of a bigger force. He couldn’t see any insignia or flag on the vehicles and he didn’t know the uniforms of different forces to be able to identify them. The distance was far too great to see individual patches and insignia. They were simply ill-defined spots of color.

  Vic could see under the edge of the camo nets. They were raised on poles to the roadside letting the soldiers have a good view. They only afforded cover from the air. Soon, it became obvious they were taking a supper break. They only set one perimeter guard out a couple of hundred meters along the road they hadn’t transversed yet. They didn’t appear to have any concerns about the road behind them or the secondary county road. Enough time had elapsed Vic felt sure there was no drone aloft or they would have recovered it and sent another up.

  One of the soldiers walked to the middle of the intersection and placed a hockey puck-sized object on the pavement. He popped a canister of purple smoke and held it until he was sure which way it would blow and then threw it downwind. It all seemed strange to Vic until several of them standing outside the nets looked up. It was hard for Vic to see from under the trees, but there was something off-white coming down. It wasn’t until it was only a couple seconds from hitting the pavement that he saw a dark bundle under a parachute fall about ten meters upwind of the intersection. That was a pretty accurate drop. It must have been steerable and the object an infrared beacon. Vic never saw or heard the plane or drone that dropped it.

  The load turned out to be fuel bladders, two for each scout car. Four soldiers on each dragged them in turn to the cars, putting one in the short box at the rear and attaching a pump to transfer the other into the vehicle. They lifted the bladder at the last, tilting it to make sure the last bit got to the pump. Then they rolled them up and discarded them in the heavier brush away from the road.

  Vic had formed the opinion they were going to overnight there but he was wrong. It was a few minutes past sundown and would be dark in an hour. Instead, there was a flurry of activity and the nets were stowed, the cars reoccupied and they were gone in ten minutes while dusk was still darkening. Vic retreated to his camp and released Eileen and Alice. Alice hurried off to ease nature and he related everything to Eileen then had to repeat it when Alice came back. They never heard a larger force follow the scouts. It wasn’t any sort of invasion.

  In the morning when they went back down to the county road, Vic returned to the intersection and inspected one of the fuel bladders, trying to determine whose forces they belonged to. It had a number and description in English, but thinking on it he realized that even if they were Mexicans or Texans, the bladder would probably be from old North American stock. It was tempting to salvage it but he already had a load to pull. What would he put in it if he owned it? He compromised by moving them down the road and off into the woods where they would be much harder to find. If he wanted to recover them later or send somebody to do so he could find them again. His circle of satellite phone owners would be interested that someone was scouting the Northern part of the state, but he couldn’t tell them who.

  * * *

  “That last, sixth segment the North Americans boosted seems to be the part with the actual drive,” Chen said. “I think they have the majority of it lifted and it’s just fitting and finishing now. They’ve had enough visits from shuttles to fuel it and several inflatable modules that could house crew. We never counted people in and out to tell if they left anybody behind. Do you want us to backtrack and do that?”

  “No, we know it’s going to be manned,” April said. “I’d be shocked if it is less than two or more than three or four. This isn’t a transport, it’s an explorer.”

  “This is a huge expenditure of resources for North America,” Chen said. “Their economy has never recovered entirely and they lost so much to Texas. They have rolled a couple of years of projected lift activity into a month.”

  “Maybe they are pinning their hopes on this being a big boost to that flat economy,” April speculated. “If they find a living world or a source of metals richer than our solar system, they will be much better off than the other Earth nations.”

  “I’d think they would mine here first,” Chen said. “Look at the Rock, they still haven’t used it up yet and gone for another like they have snowballs.

  “And yet, we are out there looking for our real estate instead of consolidating and looking for other asteroids to mine here,” April pointed out.

  Chen thought about it a little. “The whole impetus for Home’s rebellion was the expected conflict over ownership of the Rock. Maybe they aren’t so dumb,” he finally allowed. “If they find something distant there is less of a chance others will contest its possession.”

  “It depends again on scarcity,” April said. “Later, when there are several E
arth nations with star flight. If there’s enough to be found, then they will each seek their own. If good star systems are rare, there is danger there will be conflict over them too.”

  “Then, as much as possible, if you find something valuable it would be better to not lead anyone to it, and if that fails, be prepared to deny entry and defend it,” Chen said. “Have you found anything worth claiming beyond the embarrassing episode with Bright in the Centauri system?”

  “We have not found a living world, which is our ultimate desire, nor anything like a system with asteroids of gold and silver,” April said. Which didn’t precisely answer the question.

  “Have the French sought your help to discover if the North Americans breached their security and counter that?” April asked.

  “Should I be discussing what other clients are paying me to find?” Chen asked.

  “Well, I recommended your team to them, so it isn’t like I was entirely out of the loop.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t aware. Then we owe you a finder’s fee,” Chen promised.

  Chapter 16

  “Annette, I’m going to close the sale of Camelot and get paid off, three days from now in Hawaii,” Jeff said. “I’ll message you again as soon as it is done and you will have no further responsibility for anything in Camelot. My recommendation is that you have a hopper waiting with a pilot and simply leave without any notice or farewells.”

  “You better believe it. I’ve grown to expect every sort of irrational reaction to anything I do. I have no idea how they will view my leaving. Despite being unhappy with everything I do, they still wouldn’t have any trouble complaining that I am abandoning them. I’ll text my manager Feng when I get to the hopper so they aren’t searching for a body. It will be too late then for them to do anything vindictive.”