“They might be set up to detonate them on purpose if they think they are evading capture. That would seem an obvious option for off in the unknown. Safer to just destroy them.”
“There no art or message in that. The North Americans have no tradition of suicide like some other cultures. We might as well start with orbital bombardment if we just blasted them, because that’s where it would end up. We want them to see they are hopelessly outclassed and need to comply with our directions,”
“Fine, be as artistic as you wish, but I’m not going to ride along,” Walter warned.
Jeff looked a little puzzled at that. “Of course not. We didn’t hire you to do that.”
* * *
“Nick Naito is going to have another little party for his work friends,” Meijer said.
“Well, he knows you by sight now. Did you get an invitation?” Morton asked.
“No, but I still thought it might be a source of useful information,” Meijer said.
“Spying on your own government is fraught with all sorts of dangers,” Morton said. “Those in power see it as beyond your mandate and an act of disloyalty. You’d be spying on several departments, increasing the risk. I don’t believe our current administration has codified that, but the principles are in the English law we favor. The ugly history of the practice is so well known it would be difficult to plead you had no idea they would object. If the objects of your scrutiny are of a particular faction, there is no way to avoid the appearance of partisan favoritism. If you are caught, it is likely to damage us far more than any benefit I can see us obtaining.”
“Naito seems to be having an outsized influence on people. I’m sure we could justify our interest to the heads of government on that basis,” Meijer said.
“Do you think he’s plotting a violent counter-revolution?” Morton asked.
“I don’t think he has it in him,” Meijer said truthfully. “But he’s very persuasive. I’ve put bugs in the city apartment he shares, but he rarely stays there. I ran those recordings through keyword programs but that told me much less than they usually do. I ended up listening to almost the full run time of them because key words just didn’t work. He discussed politics and trade with his roomies, and always presents both sides. But by the time he is done you always seem to know which side you should take without him saying that outright.”
“Being persuasive is not a crime,” Morton reminded him.
“I think he might be more candid with his neighbor,” Meijer said, ignoring Morton’s remark. “When Nick and the Hunter woman go into town together, they don’t call out their security company for just a couple hours long shopping trip, but bugging them has proved difficult.
“I think it would be valuable to know which direction he wants to go, because I expect him to advance in politics. I’d be shocked if he doesn’t run for higher office in time.”
“So far,” Morton replied, “all you’ve convinced me of is that if he does run for a higher office, I should vote for him. He seems of good character. I’m not sure you aren’t simply trying to prove otherwise. And if he does advance to higher office, he’ll be in a position to look back and see we have records of his private conversations when there was no wrongdoing involved. He might very well take offense at that. It’s the sort of thing that sees agencies stripped of funding and powers.”
“That’s true, but we already have other cases never entered in the official agency archives. Those things can disappear just by destroying a phone or thumb drive,” Meijer said.
“You shouldn’t mumble like that. I didn’t understand a thing you said. You seem to have an obsession with Naito. If I tell you to leave him alone, I suspect you are going to observe him and try to keep me from knowing.”
“I’d just do it on my own dime and time,” Meijer said.
“Which nobody would believe while you are still in the agency,” Morton said.
“Well, you could fire me for safety’s sake,” Meijer said.
“If you thought I would you wouldn’t suggest it. Why can’t you use a walk in or fly-in bug? If you put a half dozen in his place and the neighbor’s you should have decent coverage.”
“I tried. They go in and stop transmitting. The last image I got out of one was something like a miniature crab or spider reaching out to it and then there was a flash and it was gone too.”
“Umm… help from their Spacer friends,” Morton surmised.
“That’s what I figure too,” Meijer agreed.
“You could have an agent stand-in for one of the catering staff at this party and carry a recording device on their person,” Morton suggested.
Meijer blushed deeply, drawing a deep breath, and shook his head no.
Morton was surprised at such a strong reaction. “You tried that too?” he asked.
“The caterer is an older gentleman, Mr. Kekoa, a Hawaiian. I asked if he would allow me to send an agent instead of one of his workers. He informed me that it’s a family business. Naito knows them and asked for the same servers as last time. He further reproved me, saying Nick is a nice man and I should be ashamed of myself. He volunteered that he wouldn’t tell on me and disappoint Nick since he was sure Nick knew me.”
“How could he know that?” Morton said.
“Exactly what I asked. He said if Nick didn’t know my face, I’d be asking to replace his worker myself. The old boy is no dummy,”
“That’s why you got so upset?” Morton asked.
“No,” Meijer said, getting upset a little all over again. “I got upset because I started to put my case to him a little differently, and he held up a hand and cut me off. He lifted his phone, took my picture, and said “You government types are all alike. Phone, send pix to family, all. Message: If anything happens to me this man why. Phone: I’m done. There, that went to my brothers, my sisters, wife and kids, uncles, aunts, and so forth out to extended cousins. We take care of each other. I didn’t support the revolution to have it turn into the same old crap as North America.”
“I never intended to threaten him,” Meijer insisted.
“Well, there is a legacy reputation from the heavy-handed North Americans to overcome,” Morton said. “I’d suppose Kekoa sees you as just another flavor of police. I can’t blame him. That’s a big part of why there was a revolution. People aren’t disposed to go back to that.”
“Any other suggestions?” Meijer asked.
“Yeah, drop it while you are ahead,” Morton advised but didn’t order. “And hope Mr. Kekoa doesn’t die in suspicious circumstances, so you meet thirty-eight of his grieving relatives.”
“Thanks,” Meijer said, but he didn’t say OK.
* * *
“We line up with our ships next to each other and let our clock check synchronization when I start the program,” Deloris said. “I understand all that and am totally Charming Charlie with letting the computer fly the ship. I do that for convenience and sometimes for necessity when human reflexes just won’t suffice. But I always know ahead of time what the ship is going to be doing that I’m too slow to do. I may be too slow, but they haven’t built an Artificial Stupid yet I’d trust to exercise judgment real-time in any step along the way.
“April has made clear you are one of those people who scribble a couple of lines on a board, and then get impatient with us poor slow people and skip a couple of hundred lines by drawing a swooping line and saying “Therefore…” Well, that’s not going to fly with me, Bunky. We line up and activate the program and >POOF< we’re light seconds away bracketing a ship we could barely locate with radar or optics an eye blink before. There have to be a few intermediate steps there where I need to understand exactly what’s going to happen before I’m going to say INITIATE!”
“Of course,” Jeff agreed. “I was just giving you an overview of how it will appear to us. With a known location, like this orbital facility, we don’t even have to see our objective from our start point if we have another feed showing how everything is located in real-tim
e. The computer has a 3D model from that. As soon as we jump close enough to resolve the individual ships, shops, and residential structures it will identify the target from that. If it doesn’t cross-check with what was expected it aborts. It gets a little more complicated if we have to catch them while they are under acceleration. But their drive will make them visible from behind.”
Deloris nodded. And how close do we have to be to acquire them on the move?”
“I’d prefer to do that passively,” Jeff said. “With the optics we can carry on our ships we can see them across the system looking up their drive. Sitting passively, like in Earth orbit we can discriminate between objects that size at a hundred kilometers, but we can’t jump to an accurate enough end position from there. The gimbals and servos aiming the jump engine just aren’t accurate enough.”
“You don’t have to aim the whole ship now?” Deloris asked.
“You do have to aim it still within certain limits. The mount is only for fast, fine adjustment. What we have it programmed to do is jump from our initial position where we turn it over to the computer to a thousand kilometers. The computer will check our drift from each other, correct, and jump to five hundred kilometers. It will check spacing and clocks again, acquire the cluster and perhaps the individual target, depending on the lighting, and jump to two hundred kilometers.
“It corrects and jumps to a hundred kilometers. If the last jump was sufficiently accurate it will go straight on to fifty kilometers and make the final jump from there to beside the target to snatch it. If it isn’t well within set parameters at a hundred or fifty it automatically aborts and removes us far beyond the target. From fifty kilometers we should both arrive within plus or minus five meters of the distance we dialed in and one clock cycle.”
“What’s our clock cycle?”
“Two hundred picoseconds. It’s separate from our navigational computer. But each stop takes at least a millisecond, maybe two or three, for each ship to signal a drone we are dragging along how far away it is, and the position information to be relayed to the other ship, processed, and back. The one out of position the most always corrects for both of them and that tiny physical movement of the jump engine takes more time than the data transfer.”
“Why not communicate directly between the ships?” Deloris asked.
“When we bracket the target it likely will be blocking a direct transfer,” Jeff explained.
“And that all happens faster than I can sense it,” Deloris said. Her tone didn’t sound like it was a question for sure, but Jeff went ahead and took it as one.
“I certainly hope so or we’ll look bloody foolish.”
“To ourselves,” Deloris said. “If we pop in, and the computer says no go and removes us, will they even know we passed through?”
“Good question,” Jeff allowed. “Only the first couple large jumps happen faster than the speed of light lag for them to observe them. We will be detectable close in if they have systems fast enough to see us. But they’d have to be automated. We’ll be gone before any human could know. I’ll make sure there’s nothing behind the target in the way, like the Moon, and jump out beyond the range of any possible radar we’ve observed at their shipyard site. But they have lots of radar and sensors in various orbits and even ground facilities that may be keeping a watch. They may correlate the data and see we disappeared and reappeared on a line through the facility, even if nobody checks video for transient images. I’m not sure they are that good. Just because they do stupid things, I don’t want to start assuming they will always do stupid things. I’d rather overestimate my enemies.”
Deloris looked at Jeff hard, nostrils flaring, and then forced her gaze away.
“Yes, I’m a mess socially and oblivious to people, but please tell me what that look was about.”
“You said when we jump, we go straight from here to there and there isn’t any travel between in the sense we usually think of it,” Deloris said.
“That’s as accurate as I think English can describe it,” Jeff agreed.
“So, why worry about the Moon if you are jumping well beyond it? Wouldn’t you just appear on the other side? For that matter, pointing a snatched ship back headed to the sun instead of away, couldn’t you just jump through the sun to the opposite side?”
“Maybe, even likely, Jeff admitted. “The aimpoint does curve with space around a massive body. We’ve mapped that by jumping past Jupiter at different distances. I suspect if you could jump straight beyond, your jump might be shorter on the far side. In electronics, particles do tunnel through material barriers, even if they aren’t that thick. And liquid helium does some very strange things because of quantum behavior on a macroscopic scale. I have no confidence in what a ship would do. Do you want to volunteer to take a ship beyond the sun the short way, when we can risk losing one?
“I think I’d rather sent it on autopilot and wait for it on the other side,” Deloris said.
“Me too. About the time you think you have it all figured out, you don’t,” Jeff warned.
* * *
Diana answered her com from her lanai, reclining on a lounge chair, and sipping a tall cool drink. “Hello Sweetie, what are you up to?” Eric was fascinated by the bamboo thicket behind her and the huge dog visible looking over her shoulder at her pad, but held his questions.
“I’m thinking about forming another company and looking for partners,” Eric said. “I called to offer you an opportunity to be a full partner and the right to have an equal say in who, if anybody, comes in with us.” He neglected to tell her Jeff had turned him down. Diana thought Jeff so smart that his taking a pass on the idea might be enough to put her off.
“That’s very complimentary. Do you have any others in mind?” Diana wondered.
“My sister maybe. I haven’t put it to her. It’s going to involve art and if we get her in as a partner it will be cheaper than commissioning her piece by piece. But I think we will still need to hire work out to have a variety. I thought of you first because you’ve been fair and easy to work with on the lotto. And you are on Earth now and then. I think it would be beneficial to have some of the operations there.”
“As long as it could be Hawaii,” Diana said. “I’d be very reluctant to travel very far and the truth is Hawaii is pretty far from everywhere. Want to tell me briefly what this thing is?”
“I want to make postage stamps. People collect them and pay good money for them. A lot of Earth nations have cut back on postal services or they’ve gotten very specialized. But if anything rarity has encouraged the hobby and driven prices up. Some tiny places like the Falkland Islands or Ascension Island make significant money printing them. Ascension has less than a thousand people so why couldn’t we do the same thing? But you need at least the appearance of having an official postal system to make your stamps attractive. You can’t just print them. In fact, a lot of countries make it illegal to have a private system. Some even outlaw competing package delivery services.”
“But we, Home that is, doesn’t have a postal service. At least I never heard of one,” Diana said.
“They don’t have a government lotto either,” Eric pointed out. “That was to our advantage.”
That was true, and stopped Diana’s objections cold.
“I’d try to send you a letter just to see what would happen,” Diana said, “but I haven’t received any mail since our Hawaiian revolution. I’m not sure there is a postal service here. Nobody has announced one. I’ve got some North American stamps somewhere in my desk. I’m sure they aren’t any good now except maybe on the mainland. Have you ever gotten mail on Home?”
“I’m a kid. Nobody sends me mail, but my mom and dad got quite a bit of mail the first couple of months we came up to Home. Two different states where we never lived were sending him tax bills and threatening him. We were even still getting coupons for a pizza place we liked. Dad couldn’t sell our car when we left. He owed more than it was worth so we drove it to the port and left it in
short term parking. He got a humungous bill for a month of short-term parking, then later a tow bill, and charges for storing it in the impound lot. They didn’t have any way to collect so it came to nothing.
“The UPS guy used to accept mail from any Earthie source. He’d leave a message on com that you could have it delivered to your door. Most people knew it would be a couple of hundred bucks so he didn’t get many takers. He’d toss them in a bin and you could come when he was open and paw through them if you wanted to find yours.
“That ended a couple of days ago when something caught fire in the mail bin. It smoked everything up and triggered the security system to lock the cubic down and flush it to vacuum. UPS has a good scan routine and something still slipped past them. That’s why I want an Earthside facility, for safety.”
“Why was UPS doing it for free?” Diana wondered.
“I suspect because they have a lot of contracts Earthside to move mail and it was an insignificant cost to support them,” Eric said. “It would make sense for us to pay them to carry mail for Home and Beta, but I’d aggregate them on Earth.”
“And have them deliver to people’s doors like the mailman does on Earth? Nobody has a mailbox hanging in the corridor… Hang on, I have to check something.”
Diana was gone for several minutes.
“Are you OK? You don’t have an emergency?” Eric asked when she returned.
“I’m fine. You just made me realize I’d stopped checking the mail so I wanted to see if there was anything in the box.”
“Was there?” Eric asked.
“Yeah, a bird’s nest, and they didn’t appreciate the intrusion. If there was any mail, they either covered it or included it as nesting material.
“I doubt we’d have a problem with that,” Eric said. “I already have my courier network. I just figured on using them to deliver.”
Diana paused considering it all.
“How much do you think you’d have to charge to deliver a letter? Last time I bought North American stamps a six-buck stamp would send a fifteen-gram letter.”
A12 Who Can Own the Stars? Page 34