April 2: Down to Earth (24 page)

"You can't have that kind of cash!" For the first time he was angry. "So who's funding you? Is it Eddie? Did he offer yesterday to bankroll you? He'll use you and dump you to the side, before you know what's happened," he declared.

"Well I guess that's what you have to expect, in the dog eat dog business world," she admitted sarcastically. It amazed her how easy he thought Eddie was as crooked as he was. But he'd
have
to
think that, to excuse his own ruthlessness, wouldn't he?

"It isn't any concern of yours, where I get my money." She remembered the thirty million Euro her gramps beamed to her in the living room. "Actually, I had more than enough funds available, well before Eddie talked to me yesterday. You don't know everything about me Bob. As it stands now, all I really want is to hear if you will take the six to be bought out, or turn it down."

"No, of course not, don't be ridiculous!" Bob was starting to get loud, then seemed to realize it and looked around, so April was glad she came here. Truth was, she'd be afraid to be alone with him right now. That was terrible, to feel that way about her own brother.  "That's unacceptable," he said, quieter. "I won't let you do it."

"Very well, You can't buy me out and won't let me buy you out. I would like to hang on to the
Happy
for sentimental reasons, but I'm realistic. It's going to be obsolete soon as a warship and second rate as a carrier, when the new ships reach service. I won't work with you anymore. So I'll walk away. In the morning I'll send you papers, yielding ownership to you. It's entirely your baby now. I'll serve notice to those we've been doing business with, that we are no longer partners and you are sole owner. It's nobody's business how or why that happened, so I'll just make it factual."

"What about the licensing?" He asked, finally seeing the danger. "Are you going to continue to license Singh power, for the
Happy Lewis
and the
Home Boy
?"

"You'll have to talk to me about that. I'm so mad at you right now, for the way you took me for granted and talked down to me, that I can't even discuss it with you. When I come back from Earth we'll talk about it. I'm going down late tomorrow, so it'll have to wait. Nothing will change for now, you still have your licensing. You said I must not have valued it enough, because I didn't use it to extract more money from you. Well you just educated me how silly that was. I went too easy on you because you were my brother and got ridiculed as weak for my kindness. We'll
absolutely
have to talk about it later," she said, not at all friendly, "But I'm done talking to you today."

April got up and left him sitting there. He didn't look angry now. He just looked confused, like he could not understand what just happen. He still hadn't eaten his bagel.

Chapter 21

The next day was made even more hectic, by having to create a document removing herself as a partner of Lewis Couriers, while getting ready to leave. She mailed everyone, all seventy-eight of them, in her business address book and then sent a copy to a hard print service and instructed them to send a certified paper copy requiring a receipt to Bob, Dave's shop that serviced her ship and Jeff and Heather. After some thought she added Jon and her parents and grandfather. She was sitting with gramps and Heather right now, so she had told them personally, that Bob and she were no longer partners. It appeared to be less of a surprise to her gramps than it had been to her. Heather actually said, "Good."

April looked at the small device her grandfather was holding, with real distaste. It was called a public eye. Physically it was a small square, about twenty-five millimeters on a side, with a simple pin on the back, like a brooch. In fact, it looked like it had a cabochon mounted to the front, but it wasn't a jewel, it was a camera lens. It took video and sound and streamed it off to safe storage, so a person had a seamless visual record of what happened to them all day. Heather was sitting with her gramps, letting him do the talking.

"I can understand why security people have to wear those on duty, but I can't imagine volunteering to destroy any shred of privacy I still have. People who wear these and post the record to their public journal so strangers can watch their family eating breakfast, have an exaggerated idea of their own importance. I'm surprised you'd ask me. I certainly never saw you wearing one before."

"I understand your objections. I've never felt I had need to wear one. You already agreed to let people run your public statements through software, which is really much more intrusive," he pointed out reasonably.

"Only if you plan to lie," she asserted.

Happy had to stop and think about that. "I hate to say this to you. But I honestly think it's the truth. And you can run
my
statement for analysis," he offered. "A
lot
of people, maybe most even, lie so often every day, about silly little things, that it really would be a burden to have their statements verified. They lie about how their wife or friends or workmates look. They are casually lie when asked if they are doing OK, when their life is in chaos. They get an assignment from their boss and lie about what they'll do with it."

"They cope with all these demands by saying, "Yes, Dear you look fine," when she looks like the wicked witch of the West. They say, "Oh good enough and you?" when they are thinking their marriage is breaking up and their kid is in detention for arson and they can't make the rent at the end of the month. And they are seething inside because the boss gives them some pointless assignment, that nobody will ever look at and they don't have time to do. But they lie about all of them, to keep from having even more trouble rain upon their heads for telling the truth. Because none of these people, who ask these kind of questions,
want
to hear the truth. The truth would be a disaster. So in a sense these people demand a lie of them, to avoid constant confrontation."

"If your family and friends don't demand these sort of lies from you, then you have unusually forthright friends," he assured her.

April realized, for the first time, that her mother was the only person she actively had to deceive, to keep the peace. She had to hide things she ate, like a carton of milk and she had to wear cloves and take precautions to satisfy her germ phobia. She wasn't going to volunteer that to anyone either.

"Now if they allow everyone to verify their every little statement, the machine won't tell them
why
the person is fudging the answer. But even for something as common as asking how someone is today, the software will show they were evading. So my even thinking you can afford to allow such scrutiny, is a measure of what a forthright honest person I think you are."

"But that's
you
. The camera you don't wear for
your
actions. It doesn't show you, unless you can be seen in a mirror, or a reflection in a window or something. No, the camera is for the other guy. And I can easily think you are going to run into some devious person down there, who will lie after the fact about what happened between you. With this pinned on, you can take that ability away from them."

April took it with just her fingertips, like it was dirty. "It'll work down there?" she demanded.

"There is wireless almost everywhere in urban areas. If it can't make a connection to stream the video off to safe storage, it buffers it to your com pad. I asked Heather to add extra memory to your pad and some other things. That's why she's sitting here, waiting to do that if you want it."

"How big a buffer before it's full?"

"It can store three days and then it goes back and compresses it and stretches it to six days at a little worse quality."

"OK," she said, getting her com pad out. "I can see the value of it, for the special circumstances. I don't plan to make a habit of it."

Heather got out her tools and went to work. When she was done she produced an extra case, April had assumed was more tools or materials and opened it up.

"You know Jeff and I trade ideas and hardware, with a bunch of friends on the Moon," she explained. "They are not unsympathetic to Home and to our success, but they are very limited and careful about how they express it. As soon as we knew you were going dirtside, we asked them if they had a number of items that might be of help to you and they couriered these to us." She pulled a vest out of the case, that seemed very much like the one she had adopted as a costume when she started wearing black. It was perhaps a little less stiff, but it looked too big also. Heather shook it open and laid it on the couch between them.

"I have it linked to my spex now to demonstrate, but I'll delete that link when you have it slaved to yours. Vest – cool inside twenty degrees from ambient and color white," she instructed

The vest faded to an eye dazzling pure white. "Vest, make the white look like snow." It became less glaring and slightly blue with little sparkles and a grainy look. “Feel inside," Heather invited her.

The interior was chill to her hand and seemed to be getting colder as she felt it. She had worn powered garments before, studded with nano gap cooling beads, but nothing that chilled this fast. "How many exterior colors can it do?" April asked impressed.

"It's not just a matter of color," Heather assured her. "Vest do, Swamp Grass,” and then in quick succession she called for Oak Forest, Scrub Pine and Urban Brick. "However this is the better way," she suggested and told the vest, "Blend to Environment."

Heather picked the vest up and shrugged it on. It creeped April out when the vest wiggled like a living thing and adjusted to Heather's size. "Adjust size," Heather instructed and grabbed the bottom edge at her hip and pulled it down to her knees. "It just whispered in my ear, that if I pull it any lower, it will not have as much ballistic protection," she told April. The vest had assumed the exact color of the wall covering behind her.

"That's amazing! That has to be some seriously advanced Nano," she insisted. "If it wasn't for your face you'd almost blend into the wall."

Heather didn't say anything – just grabbed the high collar and repeated the adjust size command. As she tugged, the collar grew into a hood and then she reached to her chin in front and blended it closed seamlessly in the front.

"Can you breathe OK? Can you even see me?" April worried.

"You’re a little foggy, but I can see OK to walk and it knows to stand off my face on the inside. See the roll of material around the arm opening? You can pull that down into a sleeve, but those are the limits of what it can cover. However we have something else here," she explained, taking the vest off and picking something else up from the case.

It looked like the sheerest pair of silk pajamas. Folded they were only about the size of her com pad. "This can do the same exterior colors and patterns and will keep you warm or cool, but it has very little ballistic protection. It will stop a knife thrust and small caliber pistol fire, but nothing like the vest. If the vest lets anything through, it would have killed you already. For example 20 or 40mm cannon fire, or a direct hit with a mortar will shove you so hard the blunt trauma will kill you, even if it doesn't bust through. But it's a lot better than any armor we had, to send you down in. You get two sets of the light stuff,  just turn it inside out and don't wear one set for a day and it selfcleans."

"Jeff and I are really stretching our credit with these folks, so pay attention to this. If you have to abandon any of this Earthside, you tell it through your spex to self destruct. If that doesn't work, or your spex are gone, here's what you do." She opened the vest and pointed out a red dot, about the size of a one EuroMark coin inside and then produced a small square of thin material with a similar dot in the middle. "Give it a low power shot from your pistol," she instructed.

April pulled her pistol, turned it down to five percent power and held the trigger down for perhaps a second, muzzle just off the dot. For a second nothing happened and then a ripple spread from the dot as the fabric changed texture. As she watched it divided into small squares and seemed to bead up, like it had suddenly turn liquid. The droplets seemed to shimmer for a moment as they disappeared, like they were evaporating and then they were gone. April felt with her hand and there was a film of tiny slippery balls, that rolled easily between her fingers.

"That's freaky," she allowed.

Heather nodded agreement. "A match, or even a hand lens focusing sunlight on the red dot will suffice. Our friends don't want to share this with the Earthies just yet."

"Then we shouldn't take it Dirtside," April insisted, "because there is always the unforeseen, that would leave it in somebody's hands if I were killed or disabled."

"Maybe so, but after all the trouble we went to – please take them," Heather implored her. "Modesty is nice and all, but you mean more to us than perhaps you realize."

"Thank you," was all April said, embarrassed at her depth of feeling.

"This is from Jeff," Heather laid a case between them, a little narrower and longer than a com case. When she touched the pads at opposite corners it unfolded under power and locked open silently into a compact carbine.

"Oh, neat," April said smiling. Heather could see she didn't have to sell this.

"It's got a bit more juice than a pistol," Heather explained.

"It has Jeff written all over it, the way it opens silently. Thanks."

When they were done her gramps had another detail for her.

"I asked Jon to call the USNA State Department for me and tell them a citizen of Home was traveling to USNA territory for the first time on Earth and ask an address for me that could be contacted if you ran into any problems with customs, or being denied any rights in our terms of surrender. Open your pad and I'll give it to you. I suggest you have it come up to voice as ‘State Department' instead of the lady's name.

April consulted with her mother about traveling. She had been away on missions and spent nights over on other stations commanding the
Happy
. A couple times she had even gotten a room to sleep, when she couldn't just sleep in the ship, because of people coming and going, or moving freight. But she had never taken a non-business trip away alone for a stretch of days, where she would be going to amusement parks and fancy restaurants. She might have packed a fair sized bag of her favorite outfits, but her mom pointed out that almost all the value of them was due to having been lifted to orbit, so it made little sense to take them the other way. She could do some shopping, the like of which was not available on Home. In the end she did take one extra clean outfit in case she couldn't shop right away.