A12 Who Can Own the Stars?

by Mackey Chandler

  “Locker five,” April told Diana pointing. She wasn’t an old hand at zero g but she got a trash bag and sealed Nick’s shirt in it before they had a mess to clean up.

  “I’m so sorry,” Nick said, thoroughly embarrassed.

  “Don’t be. That was mighty quick thinking. You had no warning, a full stomach, and way too much excitement,” April said. “You did marvelously.”

  “Do you need an antiemetic shot?” Jeff asked.

  “Now that I’m empty, I feel fine,” Nick said as if it surprised him too. “I’d sure appreciate something to get the taste out of my mouth.”

  “Cold drinks and stuff behind the yellow door with a recessed release,” April said, pointing again. “I’d suggest a Coke, and keep another bag handy, just in case.”

  “I still don’t understand. Did I pass out a little bit? We were tipping over and then we were floating here. It seemed continuous, but maybe I blacked out?”

  “No, that’s just how the ship works,” Jeff assured him, “though I never intended to do it sitting on the ground. I just couldn’t think of any other choice. She was so far over I doubt she could have stabilized if I fired the engines. We’d have cartwheeled into the apron from the momentum of our rotation before it could straighten out.”

  “Where are we then?” Nick asked, still a little confused.

  “That’s an interesting question. About a hundred kilometers above the Earth, but not on a perpendicular like I planned, and without a margin from climbing out on our engines added to that. We are that distance away from Honolulu on something more than a seven-degree angle, because we’d passed our tip point. We’ll be starting to fall back to Earth, at a steep angle since we have the same rotational velocity we had on the surface, but I’ll do something about that very quickly, before it becomes a problem.”

  “To the west, and becoming more so, because that’s the way we were tipping,” April said. “Better than tipping towards North America and giving them something to shoot at. But I thought we had a full ten degrees before we were in danger of going over?”

  “Not with four tons of gold changing our center of gravity higher,” Jeff said. “Look, I’d like to rotate the ship but don’t want you two tumbling around the cabin. Can you guys hang on to the access stairs while I turn her?”

  With Diana’s help, Nick got a grip behind April’s seat and Diana behind Jeff’s.

  “Ship, flip one-eighty dead slow,” Jeff voice commanded.

  There was a barely perceptible motion as the ship twisted around them. Nick and Diana tightened their grip on the stairs briefly and then took on the motion.

  There was another tug as the rotation was ended and they all looked at the new scene outside the viewports. In front of a grand view of the Earth, a flat shield of concrete with a hole burned through the middle from their landing was flipping end over end receding very slowly. The flat side turned away and the opposite face it showed was a segment of a sphere, dotted with the shiny ends of embedded rebar. Floating to one side was the front end of Diana’s car, cut off short of the windshield.

  “Oh Floyd, they killed you,” Diana wailed.

  “There was somebody out there?” Jeff asked, horrified. “I mean other than whoever was driving the truck bomb. I can’t care about him.”

  “No, Floyd was my car. Named after my third husband. You’d have to know him, but he was expensive, lasted way too long and…was kind of underpowered too,” Diana admitted.

  “Ship, back off, ten seconds full power on attitude jets,” Jeff ordered.

  The slowly flipping lens of concrete and wreck receded until Jeff started them turning back away from it.

  “The fee for patching the pavement is going to be a little higher,” April predicted.

  “The crater where the truck bomb went off is going to be even bigger and I expect we’ll get billed for that too. I can hardly blame them,” Jeff allowed. “I’m checking the camera in the hold. It appears the Brinks guys did strap everything down just fine, so I can set course for Home.”

  “I’m going to Home?” Nick asked, surprised.

  “Do you really think I’m going to set back down there just to drop you off?” Jeff asked. He was punching commands on his board to move them before they fell and broke up.

  “No, I’m kind of running behind the curve today. Everything is happening faster than I can process it,” Nick admitted. “But you better call Diana’s patrol service and tell them to put a car in her drive to watch both houses, and feed Ele’ele while we are gone.”

  “Oh crap, and take the roast out of the oven I have thawing in a Dutch oven and cancel it cooking at 1400,” Diana remembered.

  * * *

  “Show me again,” The Chief of Hawaii’s new military asked his aide.

  The surveillance video from the nearest pole camera was of excellent quality. His aid held up the tablet and left it slowed down to show detail like the first time he played it. The truck was barreling down the runway at a good clip, at least a hundred thirty kph. It was right on the end markers almost off the runway when it blew. You could see the driver and he appeared to be alone. The was a flare of light on the roof of the cab that traveled back to the box behind just before the explosion.

  “They definitely shot him,” he said for the third time. “If you watch closely you can see the dark dot of a port open high on the ship.” He looked down at the bowl cut out of the concrete like a melon baller had scooped it out. There was a small patch of bare dirt at the bottom though it seemed to be charred. “The tower said he called out, “Honolulu Departure,” and then “Oh crap, no ti…” the last word cut off when he released the mic. Time, probably. But the ship is there, falling over in the video, and then it’s just gone.”

  “The car…” Words failed him. The front was shaved off flush with the hole in the concrete. The front tires and suspension were gone, so it sat tilted down against the pavement.

  The aide nodded agreement but had nothing to add. It was just as inexplicable to him.

  “The Prime Minister is going to come take a look at it and he’s bringing some of the civilian intelligence people,” his aide warned.

  “Why not? This cries out for spooks if anything ever did. It’s the spookiest damn thing I’ve ever seen.” He smiled, amused. “I’m going to stick around just to watch them squirm and try to look like they have any idea what did this.”

  * * *

  “So, we just went >POOF< and disappeared?” Nick asked.

  “It’s complicated,” April said. Jeff looked at her like he wanted to argue that.

  “We disappeared there,” she continued, “but when we appeared above, and we rolled over to look at the Earth and all the crap we dragged along with us, we still retained the motion we had sitting there on the ground.

  “You realize, speaking of sitting there on the ground and in the next breath saying we were in motion sounds very contradictory to me,” Nick said.

  “You have a very narrow view, like a lot of grounders,” April said. “You are sitting at rest relative to the ground, but the ground, the entire Earth is spinning. That why most people launch to the east. That’s free motion towards reaching orbital speed since that’s the direction the Earth is turning,” April said, twirling a finger hanging down counter-clockwise.

  “Oh, I guess I thought it was to be out over the ocean if it crashed.”

  “And the spinning Earth is in motion around the sun,” Jeff said, making the same twirling motion, but making it progress along a bigger arch.

  “And the sun…” April started, but Nick held up a forestalling hand.

  “That’s entirely enough twirling layers,” he objected. “I get it. Don’t run it into the ground. Have you watched a ship do this? Does it boom or flash or dissolve in sparkles like a science fiction movie?”

  “Interesting you should ask that. We never did this before. I’d love to see video of us leaving if your people have any. There’s a broad-spectrum flash of radiation, but I’m not
sure how bright the visible portion would be against the landscape and sky in full sunlight. I suppose it makes a bit of a >pop< when all the air rushes back in to fill the hole where the air and, uh, other stuff was, that we took with us.”

  “You never did this before?” Nick asked in horror. He couldn’t say any more, shaking his head no much slower and gently than the first time.

  “Would you rather have toppled over on the pavement?” Jeff asked. “We’ve jumped out at altitude before, but we were just dragging some very thin air along. April had this silly idea when we first discovered the effect, that if you jumped sitting on the lunar surface, you’d drag the whole moon along with you. Obviously, we know that’s not true now.”

  “Because you just tested it for the first time?”

  “Well yes, I don’t think we need to test it with various larger bodies. We’ve tested dragging smaller objects along to start assembling a moon,” Jeff admitted. “We know it’s limited even if we haven’t established all the parameters.”

  “You’re insane to take these kinds of chances,” Nick declared.

  “I doubt you can show that in a clinical sense,” Jeff said. “I may seem insane by your personal sense of risk taking. I’m sorry you feel that way after I saved us all, but I didn’t invite you aboard. You asked to see the flight deck.”

  “I asked…” Nick repeated.

  April tried hard to look neutral and Diana looked embarrassed, but for who?

  “My people probably think I’m dead,” Nick concluded.

  “Well that’s easily fixed if you like,” Jeff offered. “We can call them up and let them see you on com and chat with them easily enough. If you want to.”

  “Why wouldn’t I want to?” Nick asked him.

  “It’s very hard to disappear in the modern world. If you aren’t happy with anything. If you’d like a fresh start. It’s a rare gift to have a chance to disappear and start over. That is one of the benefits of coming to Home. You can declare any name you want coming in and that’s who you are as far as we’re concerned.”

  “I’m delighted with how my life is going. Couldn’t you tell? I have a responsible position and worthwhile work. I have a foot in the door for bigger things down the road.”

  “Oh, I’m glad for you. I just didn’t know. We’ve never discussed it. Do you want to call now or leave it for later when you aren’t so upset?”

  Nick started to open his mouth to object, and then stopped. “Maybe that would be better,” he had to admit. Even Jeff could tell he was upset without discussing it.

  * * *

  “The security sensors on the field registered a very brief pulse of radiation at the exact instant the ship disappeared,” The Hawaiian agent, Meijer, told his boss, Morton.

  “How brief and what kind?” he demanded.

  “Within a single clock cycle of the detectors, so less than four microseconds. It was a spread of soft x-rays, harder x-rays, and gamma. In my opinion probably frequencies outside the sensitivity of the sensor. Only the closest sensor at the end of the runway that was cratered showed some beta and some heavier particles, likely heavier than alpha rays.”

  “Fission products?” he wondered.

  “I can’t disprove that but my gut feeling is no,” Meijer said. “There were no neutrons detected at the more distant sensors at air freight. And no radiation at the depression from fission products.”

  “Was there enough to be a health hazard if you’d been close?”

  “The count at the sensors fit an inverse square profile. At fifty meters you’d have gotten about as much as an old-fashioned film x-ray. So no. There was also a sharp ‘click’ at all radio frequencies.”

  “Radar too?”

  “I didn’t think to check,” Meijer admitted. “I’ll have the recordings checked for artifacts.”

  The chief scowled and thought, but nothing made sense.

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes, examining the video frame by frame the last frame with the ship visible shows a small flash of visible light where the nose of the ship is.”

  “It’s glowing?” his boss asked.

  “I don’t think so. It’s a point source. If you didn’t know better, you’d think it was a specular reflection on the hull. The video has a two hundred forty a second refresh rate. I think it is similar to a double exposure. The ship is there for part of that frame and then the flash happens before it is finished.

  “Tell me more about the Business Minister,” Morton demanded.

  “Nick Naito, he’s promoted Singh landing and doing business on the island before. They’ve landed at remote fields for security and never had any trouble like this. There was a third party involved in this flight with a high value shipment, so they wanted it done at a normal port with more security than isolation would afford them. There is no evidence Naito or his neighbor, Diana Hunt, planned to lift with the ship. Supposedly, they were just seeing Singh and his partner Lewis off.

  “Indeed, what convinced me of that was they called Hunt’s security company to secure the house, feed her dog, and remove a roast from the oven. Who would go to all that trouble to cover a planned exit? He lives next to the Hunt woman up a remote road on a ridge, but the home is owned by the Lewis woman. He hasn’t called his agency yet, but then he’s still on personal time and hasn’t missed going to the office yet.

  “Some others in government have been up there. He had a bit of a party for them. They also told me he doesn’t own it, but one winked and laughed, and another laid his finger against his nose and tilted his head like a Brit. He also has a shared apartment in the city more people are familiar with. Do we have any idea who sent the truck bomb?”

  Morton didn’t reply quickly. Probably deciding if Meijer had any need to know.

  “There were some organic remains we are almost sure were from the driver. They test Asian, but no match anybody will admit having. I’ll believe it was unplanned by Singh or the others on the ship,” his boss said. “You don’t shave it that close with your ship knocked off balance headed for ruin as a diversionary stunt. And from what? Is Naito involved with the Lewis woman who lets him live there?”

  “More likely the neighbor,” Meijer said. “She’s twenty-five years older than him but she’s had Life Extension Therapy on Home. You would guess her age by her appearance at about thirty years old now. And she rents a place on Home from Singh too. It appears to be common knowledge on Home that Singh is involved with the Lewis girl. They are business partners and appear in gossip sites attending clubs together.”

  “They are all connected back and forth in a hopelessly complex mess, aren’t they?” the spy boss asked. He illustrated by meshing his fingers.

  “The more we learn, the less I expect it to get any simpler. April, the Lewis woman, visited the island a few years back. She shot a North American official dead and was attacked by the Chinese while on the island. She was staying with a Japanese family, the Santos, and they whisked her off the island on a private boat.”

  That was interesting. When he mentioned the Santos his boss stiffened all over. That would be something worth remembering. The old boy was usually unflappable.

  “I’m going to be very careful about the whole affair. Everywhere I look there is serious money involved. The houses up there on the ridge run about thirty million Australian. The Hunt woman seems to have a whole list of island properties and interests in businesses. I’m aware she has been married at least six times and had substantial settlements or inheritances from every one of them.”

  “Six times? Unless she was hiding some of the earlier ones you have to be unduly optimistic to be number five or six and think it would end well.”

  “I know, but they all were highly successful intelligent businessmen. Maybe they knew but thought it worth the cost,” Meijer suggested. “It’s like buying a mega-yacht. Nobody thinks it’s going to be an investment. Oh! And the manifest for the ship said it was picking up a cargo of four tons of gold.”

 
; That made his boss lift his eyebrows. “I understand. People at that level don’t like to have their affairs questioned or even examined too closely. Given the need to show a little discretion with these particular actors, would you feel comfortable having your name on this report to the Prime Minister?”

  “As long as you make clear it’s at least half pure speculation. And in my humble opinion, when you interrogate the Minister, I wouldn’t try to sweat him or make any threats you aren’t sure you can deliver.

  “Fine. I’ll put my name on it first and make that clear. I want my butt covered too.”

  * * *

  “I’m aware neither of you has zero g experience. We don’t have an acceleration couch for you either. So I can’t ask you to put up with high acceleration on a bare hard bulkhead. What I’m going to do is hold my acceleration at a half g which makes resting on a hard surface bearable, but plot a course that keeps us under that acceleration constantly, except for a brief pause to flip over in the middle. We’ll arrive at Home pretty dry, get more mass there, and another pilot will take the ship to central to be unloaded.

  “I’d have thought you’d want to keep the gold at your bank,” Nick said.

  “We don’t even have an office on Home,” Jeff told him. “Our bank on Home is my pad and local backup. Irwin, at the Private Bank, has offices in the main business corridor. It’s a significant expense. If I had to, I might pay him to keep something in his vault, but not four tons. Even he forwards anything of high value to Central. It’s taken down kilometers deep there, where it is safe.”

  “If this ship is going on to the Moon, when am I going to have a chance to go home?”

  “You just got a free lift to Home,” Diana told him. “That’s worth about an ounce. Since you are here why not just tell your people it will be a week or two before you will be able to arrange passage back to Hawaii? I’ve been on Home enough to be your tour guide and show you some things. Consider yourself my guest. Jeff has been staying at my apartment when I’m on Earth, but he has other places to stay and you can guest with me.”

  Nick thought about that. “OK, it’s not like I left voluntarily. We were attacked. I can hardly be blamed for abandoning my post. I’ll call my superior and my people when we get to your place,” he told Diana. “Is there somewhere I can buy some clothes and things?”