April 2: Down to Earth (29 page)

"Would you please alarm me if you should see a drone take a new interest in this area?"

"Yes, you are on the alarm list. That is sufficient voice sample to identify you now."

"You have a very smart house."

"We like it. I hope you like it here too," her dad said. "I wouldn't worry about the paparazzi finding you here though," he assured her, grinning. "It seems they are all surrounding a hotel down on the beach, waiting for you to come back."

"Huh, looks like you got good value out of that reserved room after all," Adzusa noted.

April felt safe enough now and took the vest off, folding it and putting it on the edge of the table and laid the aikuchi on it. She could tell Papa-san was itching to ask about the knife but restrained himself for now. The laser she left on. She was used to it and it didn't even feel it or think of it anymore.

"Papa-san your security is good, but I'm thinking somebody from the government might be able to pressure the aerostat company to corrupt your feed and it has to be limited in area. Would you permit me to make a gift of the Home Militia satellite surveillance feed to the House?" April offered.

"That would be very much appreciated," he said nodding thanks. "There is an element of risk being around you, but that is just factual observation, not complaint."

"They had a drone tail us and April shot it. Took three bugs off the truck too," Adzusa told him. "We stopped at Sam's for lunch and she went outside and burned it over his pasture."

"Well, I hope they don't give him much trouble over it," her mother said.

"If one shows up here just tell me," her dad offered. "I don't think they'd have the nerve to do that, but if they do - then if you don't pot it I will."

"Sounds good to me," April agreed. She was wondering what kind of business he was retired from, that he wouldn't be shy to shoot a drone himself. The Feds would get ugly with one of their own citizens about that she would think and she remember Adzusa wasn't naturalized. Maybe he was though? That would be odd.

The fruit salad was good. Especially the strawberries. A quart of it and a half dozen cookies and she could probably make it to supper OK.

Chapter 26

They spent a long time on the patio, until the sun disappeared behind the house and the shadows started getting long across the open areas. Adzusa's parents were so nice and had the skill of making a person comfortable. Papa-san finally steered the conversation around to the aikuchi and April explained it was a gift from the man Adzusa worked with, Genji Akira. She invited him to examine it. When he was done he asked for himself, to see her pistol. He was amused when it spoke Japanese to him.

"Speaks it better than I do," she admitted ruefully. "Pistol accept input from holder. Full function except single shot, administrative access and self destruct. Initiate designator beam on trigger pressure. Go ahead and shoot it if you want," she invited. "It is usually run through spex, but doesn't have to be."

"Not that I'm objecting," he said. "But why did you lock out single shot? It sounds like it would be safer than say a continuous beam."

"Because if you take a single shot, that means it is the last shot the pistol will every take. It will go into an emergency mode, where the power supply dumps as much as it can into the pumping diodes, without self destructing. It will pump out one tremendous shot for about a half second and then the residual heat after will ruin the crystal. When it does that the little ring on the barrel blows a sheet of gold coated Mylar out from the barrel, to protect the shooter from back scatter radiation from the beam. After that the only function that would work would be self-destruct because the guts are burned out. But there would still be enough power in storage for that. We're never going to let a pistol be drained dry, so it can't keep itself from being opened up and studied. The pistol is probably as smart as your house. It's a very smart pistol," she assured him again.

"And how much power does it discharge if it self-destructs to keep out prying eyes?"

"It usually dumps the whole charge. Right now about four kiloton."

"My," was all he said rolling it on its side, looking at it thoughtfully.

He looked out between the buildings, where a portion of the driveway was visible climbing to the house. One of the switchbacks with a couple boulders piled on the inside of the curve was visible, about eighty meters away. He held the pistol out in a relaxed grip and when he touched the trigger April noted the aiming dot appeared on the biggest boulder, without him fumbling around walking the point of light where he wanted it. She could see he'd shoot just fine without the aid. He squeezed the trigger and held the beam steady on the rock. In the dusk a little flash of backscatter light ran through the rainbow and as usual seemed to have green dominate. The noise, usually a shriek in thinner materials, was a bass moan from the solid dense material of the boulder. There was a sound like popcorn being made, as the beam ate away a crater in the side. Then after perhaps three seconds at full power there was a loader pop and the rock shattered into three or four major pieces when the core expanded and burst it. When he let off the trigger, there was a small area visible in the jumbled pile, that still glowed with red heat in the gathering dusk.

"I can think of a few times I could have used this," he admitted admiring it. "You could heat some rocks if you didn't have fuel in the desert and cook dinner on them."

That was a use April would have never thought of. "It has a port in the bottom there that will allow you to plug your p-suit in and run off the power pack," April explained. “I suppose there are all sorts of things you could run off that.”

Thinking how very different their perspectives were she blurted out, "Have you ever been up there? Have you been above the atmosphere?"

"No, I haven't. And that's always been a major regret," he admitted. "I've rode a hypersonic on the very edge, but never been into orbit."

"You are ex-military then?" April asked.

There was an uncomfortable silence and then Adzusa spoke. "She'll find out sooner or later. She sticks her damn nose in everything and if you drop one little word once that hints at something, she'll remember it a month later and deduce the whole story. My dad's a spook April."

"Not true," he objected. "I'm a retired spook. There's a great deal of difference. In fact it's quite a difficult status to attain. The profession isn't really one you'd choose, if you looked ahead at how many finish out their service and have a quiet retirement. Way too many end up dead or in mental hospitals. Sometimes even their own county's mental hospitals. Even worse, some end up as politicians."

"A spy?" April asked, perhaps a bit skeptically, afraid they were putting her on.

"I'd prefer intelligence officer," he assured her. "Spies they just drag out back and shoot in the head when they are caught. Intelligence officers they sometimes trade for each other."

"You wouldn't by any chance know a Swiss fellow, Jan Hagen?" she asked, testing. Jan had said the same thing about spies. It was a good line, easily remembered.

There was a flash of recognition and a big smile. "You know Jan? No kidding? What is the evil scoundrel doing now-a-days?"

"Well, we had a little problem at ISSII one day and Jan was seeing us off safe. He was security officer on the hab. He escorted Eddie Persico and some folks we were rescuing to us, on the
Happy Lewis and
the Chinese were giving him a heck of a time. It was quite an adventure."

"If Jan was involved I'm sure it was. How did he resolve his problem with the Chinese?"

"Well, we really didn't stick around to see. They were refusing to ungrapple us from dockage and Easy was getting ready to cut us off the station with our weapons systems, when a vac rat who had fueled us did us the favor of manually unhooking us. Easy had already blown pressure on their dock shooting a sniper and then shot up their control room through the view port. So when we stood off, nobody was exactly chatting with us or waving goodbye. The Chinese tried to ram us with a yard tractor and we burned them and I admit I was kind of peeved. So we were kind of hanging there, burning their antenna farm off the sat, so they couldn't yell for help or follow us on radar, when we saw the airlock open and a bunch of the Chinese went for a space walk without benefit of p-suit. That's when we knew Jan had resolved his issues with them," she concluded.

"That sounds like Jan. He always was weak on negotiation."

"That's a tremendous story," Adzusa told her. "Why didn't you ever tell it?"

"Well we did. We sold video of that and a bunch of other stuff to the BBC. Hours and hours of it. But you know from inside how news is. They cherry pick one little clip and play it over and over and never do a story in depth unless it's pay for view, or on some obscure specialty channel. All they ever showed much was us ambushing the
Pretty as Jade
and the
James Kelly,
then a short clip of the Chinese marine off the
Jade
getting killed by Dr. Singh. He's the guy we rescued," she added. "You can write the story if you want. I'd give you a copy of our video to the BBC, because they only paid for a forty eight hour exclusive. It's no secret at all. But it's kind of old news now. I don't think anyone would be all that interested."

 "You went all through these battles with space stations and space ships and
sold
the video of it to the BBC? Heavens how much did you get?" Lin wondered. Papa-san looked embarrassed she would ask such a personal thing.

"Oh my brother sold it for us. He got ten million Euro and we split it even between all of us on the
Happy
and him. We figured if we
gave
it to them they wouldn't value it or show it. That's how people are. They don't appreciate something if they get it free. So it wasn't much split six ways."

"It wasn't?" Lin asked.

"Hey, you didn't think we were poor did you?" April looked concerned.

Papa-san was laughing behind his hand at the look on his wife's face.

Chapter 27

The same young man who had served them when they sat, came out and asked if the cook could serve dinner in a half hour? Papa said that was fine, which April was happy to hear. He walked back in and before anyone could resume the conversation April's com chimed.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I don't know who would be calling me. Do you mind if I take it?"

They all made dismissive gestures. "Go in if you need privacy dear," Lin offered.

April just shook her head no and flipped the pad open.

It was a four-way conference with Dave who serviced their ships on the main screen, her grandfather in one corner, Jeff and Heather in another and Jon and her dad in the third.

"April, I got your communication this morning about not being a partner with Bob any more. He came in to do an emergency run today with a new crewman and the
Happy
was not prepped to boost. We had too much torn down to slap it back together, so he loaded his crate on the
 Home Boy and
insisted on taking it. I offered to send one of my guys with him if he needed a third crewman, because that's what you've been doing, but he refused. He said he was doing an orbital transfer, so he didn't need a dock guard. We're kind of worried about him because he didn't do a near earth orbit. He did a Lunar insertion burn, has been in a Lunar orbit and was joined by a ship lifting from Armstrong. Do you know of any orbital transfer delivery he'd be doing with an Armstrong company?"

"No I have no idea. And I don't know anything about a new crewman. I mean, I just quit, so he'd have had to hire the guy today. None of this has anything to do with me now."

"We're worried he might have been forced to leave," her dad theorized. "Perhaps this guy kidnapped him."

"That would be pretty hard to do," April thought out loud. "There are times you are really at the mercy of your fellow crew. Unless the man had something subtle to coerce him. But something as simple as holding a pistol on him just wouldn't work."

"That's what Dave told us," her dad admitted.

"Bob has been acting strangely," April said truthfully. "That's why I quit working with him. I didn't even get a payout of my share. He wouldn't buy me out, or let me buy him out. There was no coming to any agreement with him about anything. I just walked away, because he was hell bent on treating Eddie badly. He said bluntly he was going to cut him out as soon as he could and intimated he would do the same to Jeff as soon as he could get control of the drive technology."

There was a sudden silence of dead air time. Nobody was saying anything and every one of them was thinking the same thing.

"He wouldn't try to take the technology literally would he?" Dave asked. "I mean he wouldn't hijack the ship to try to strip out the drive and reverse engineer it? He's more the sort who would maneuver legally, or with business pressure to get what he wanted, not just grab it."

"I'm not sure anymore," April admitted. "He said some very hurtful things yesterday, I never thought I'd hear. I offered him six million for his share and he bragged on how he had positioned the company for a huge run up of value and expected that pay out. He told me what I had contributed he could have hired out to a salary man, so I didn't deserve any more than a hireling."

"What sort of ship climbed out of Armstrong to match with him?" Her gramps asked.

Dave looked off screen for a moment and came back. "It was a heavy Lunar transport. USNA military. I don't think they're armed, so we never were concerned about their few Lunar vehicles. He
does
know the drives are booby trapped. I don't think he is stupid enough to try to open something Jeff wants sealed up. He should have some idea how inventive Jeff can be and know there's no way they could ever get in."

"He might, but I wonder if the USNA knows it?" Heather asked. "If they insisted on opening it up, I doubt if they would care to allow him to stand off at a safe distance. It would be foolish to deal with those devils. What were Bob's politics like anyway? Did he even have any?"