April 4: A Different Perspective (35 page)

"Does Eddie know you're going to have this asset?"

"I haven't told him. If he's much of a spy-master he probably knows," Jeff joked.

"I'd tell him. Soon. He may be irritated you didn't tell him, even if he finds out himself. I tried to try to hire one of his guys and found out he worked for me already. I felt sort of silly not knowing. He's that fellow Chen, who hangs out with the security guys."

"I didn't know Eddie had recruited him yet either," Jeff admitted. "We haven't talked since the initial proposal. I'd hate to demand a constant flow of reports. It eats up time for him to stop and tell me nothing important is happening. It's after all a part time thing for Eddie to supervise. I'm going to leave it the way it is. If he has something important I know he'll tell me and the mundane he can accumulate until he has enough to bother."

"That's smart I think. What you are refusing to do, is to create a
bureaucracy
that feeds on itself to make work. Pretty soon you'd need another guy, to produce summaries of all the reports
you
demanded, but don't have time to read."

"I never really thought about
how
these huge expensive agencies get so bloated, but I think you have it figured out, right there. I need to spy on the CIA and the very size of it is daunting. I spent money for a reentry sled to drop some drones near their Seattle offices, but I can't afford to keep spending that sort of money to cover them. They're
everywhere
. But I think the agents I'm looking for will be in that office. The drone carrier drops tomorrow and then it will take a day to get in position."

 "If you succeed in having agents on Earth, drones are not forbidden technology. A lot of places, you could just FedEx drones to them. Loading the really sensitive stuff, the software, down there of course."

"I'd have never thought of that."

"And if you can get Papa-san to have his ship do work for you, they can release a drone for you off a target's coast. From out past the legal limit if need be."

"I'll discuss all this with Eddie," Jeff promised.

"When are you going back to Central?"

"Two, maybe three days."

"I'll be ready to go with you."

* * *

"Mr. Singh, I'm Rupert Molson. I'm one of the directors and an owner of the SIH partnership. We intend to send a mission to the Jupiter region and return with an object of ice and other volatiles."

"I'm quite aware of your venture. We'd have bought in, but we just had far too many other projects going to afford a share."

"We?" asked Molson raising an eyebrow.

"I am equal partners with Heather anderson and April Lewis, just as your operation is a partnership. We each have a few ventures of our own we have not merged. Heather is developing real estate on the Moon and April has a whole portfolio of little companies, but Singh Industries is jointly held, not to be confused with Singh Technologies, that is my step mum and my dad."

"We are looking at a very long voyage. Certainly the longest space voyage to date. It will likely be a year or more outbound and two to five years back to the Earth-Moon system, depending on what they capture. This is assuming you will sell us Singh power systems," he added. "With conventional engines we wouldn't attempt it at this time. We could do it with polywell reactors, but power density is not there and there are licensing issues."

"That's not a problem. I wish you every success and feel your project is a plus, necessary even, for Home."

"That's good to hear, because I'd like to speak of using some of your other technology. We are aware you have some sort of gravitational control. The ships Eddie Persico owns have been seen accelerating for prolonged periods, at levels that imply such systems. What we would like to know is if you can provide not just nullification of perceived acceleration, but the reverse, an artificial gravitational gradient, in a vehicle not accelerating? We were looking at spinning two ships on a cable, to avoid the long term health problems of weightlessness. If we could avoid that it would make the mission significantly easier and more efficient."

"First, this would involve my step mother," Jeff said thoughtfully. "She is the only source of the proprietary material used in our ship systems. This would take a lot of it, although she is trying to ramp up production. The thing is, I don't really know if it would work the same way in the outer system as it does locally."

"Why
wouldn't
it?"

"We don't have a decent model of what makes it work. No real theory. So we have no idea how it will function away from the thick gravitational gradient near a planet. We've never tested it in outside that environment. I'd be happy to, but we've never had time and funds for a deep space prone to go actually measure it."

"This is critical enough to our effort we might be willing to cooperate with you in such a probe. Especially if it could radio back the test results in a timely manner, so we could apply them to our building program."

"That's a welcome offer. We could send it to Jupiter and have it slingshot around the planet to come home. You should be aware though, that our device is not going to allow you to have anything approaching a one G deck, where people walk around with a one G pull on them from head to foot. Right now, you are looking at a state of the art, which will allow you to form a one G pull, with perhaps a plus or minus tenth-G difference from one side of your body to the other laying down. Think of it as a tidal gradient. Would you like to sit in a one of our pilot seats and experience the system?"

"That would probably tell me more about applying it to our problems, than all the graphs and technical data in the world."

"We have a ship at dock. Let's go over and let you experience it. Perhaps we can work a trade of equipment for an interest in your venture."

* * *

"We are being probed," the head of station, Seattle, complained angrily.

"We're always being probed one way or another," his security head shrugged.

"Not physically. Electronically, distant optical surveillance, yes, but not
invaded
." He tossed a tiny wad of fine wires and foil on the desk.

"What, uh,
was
that?"

"Some sort of robotic drone. I'm almost certain it flew."

"It isn't like you to qualify statements."

"There was a crow thrashing about in distress on the lawn. It was unusual enough I wanted to know why. This was in its gullet. I theorize it thought it a moth or junebug and swallowed it in midair. It is of course indigestible. Whoever designed these obviously didn't test them in real world conditions sufficiently. They need some way to repel birds."

"These? You've found more than one of them?"

"No, but it's like turning a light on and finding a roach. You
know
there is never just one."

* * *

Molson strapped in the number two seat, as Jeff instructed. "You need to hook the helmet link on the back that limits helmet motion too," Jeff instructed. "Here, on the couch edge, behind the belt lock," He guided the man's hand until he found the lever inside a guard. "Pull until you feel a snap and then try to lean forward and lift your head."

He tried to lift his head but it only went about a centimeter before it hit a cushioned stop. "It's set to allow you to turn your head a good thirty degrees each way," Jeff explained. "You need that to see out the back edge of the view ports, piloting, but I'd set it to about ten degrees if you were a passenger." Jeff moved over to the command couch and flipped some switches, bring up power on the systems he needed. Some of the lights went from red to green. "The seat is going to reconfigure and lift your legs," Jeff warned him.

"You don't have to undock to show me?"

"Nah, it's still pretty much an inverse square field, unless you are down in the guts of the thing, where it gets a little more complicated. All that's inside the housing and you won't have to deal with it," Jeff assured him. "It would be hard to detect outside our hull. I'm going to run it up about a quarter of the range now," he alerted him again.

There was a barely-felt vibration and a faint whine near the limits of audibility.

"Oh my goodness, I'm hanging, uh,
down,
or is it
up,
on my straps? It feels weird," he said, amazed. His arms had floated up at first, but then he pulled them back across his chest. "My legs seemed like they are pulled up more than my torso."

"Yep, you can take more acceleration that way. Your heart doesn't have to work as hard to pump blood to the legs. So to use it the way you guys are thinking, the units would be behind you, pulling you down, into the couch, or bunk, or whatever."

"We need this. What will it take to get it for a crew of six?"

"Let's go talk to my mum," Jeff offered. "A lot of it is up to her."

* * *

Heather greeted April with a hug, prolonged when April wouldn't let go of her and spoke softly in her ear and then she was allowed to greet Jeff.

"Johnson, we are in conference," Heather called on com. "Don't call me on com unless you have an invasion you can't repel yourself. – No, not Wiggen either," she said emphatically, to his unheard question, tension crackling in her voice. She took her spex off and left them on the console.

"Come on, let's go to my quarters," she invited. "I'll make some tea and we can talk."

In the administrative dome Dakota lifted an eyebrow to Johnson. "Big
boss
talk-talk," he said, with a smirk. Dakota feigned to not hear.

When they didn't come out in a couple hours, Dakota started to worry a little. Then they missed lunch. When they finally did came out before supper, there was no explanation or new orders. Heather checked the com board and called for a rover to go somewhere. They suited up and seemed as happy as could be, but left in the rover, still without going to supper. There were always rations in a rover of course, but not a nice sit-down meal.

"Well, apparently nothing happened that is going to upset our world," Dakota said, with a sigh of relief. Johnson squinted, visibly holding laughter in.

"What?" Dakota asked, unhappy with him. She didn't communicate this way, with smiles and frowns and eye rolling and what she felt bordered on insubordinate innuendo. Couldn't he just spit it out what he had to say, honestly?

"They all had wet hair, fresh from the shower," was all he'd say.

Chapter 31

"What the hell is this?" the custodian asked his supervisor. He was holding a shiny silver bug trapped in a water glass, with a paperback book sealing off its quest for freedom. When he sat it on the table it made a circuit of its prison checking for openings and then sat in the bottom of the glass waiting. After a few seconds it slowly became the same color as the table.

"Where did you find that? It creeps me out."

"I was dusting the overhead lights in the lunch room and disturbed it."

It wasn't until the next morning that it worked its way up the table of organization to the head of station. By then it was in a cherry jelly jar, with a few completely unnecessary air holes punched in the lid.

"I want this building
searched
, top to bottom, like you are looking for a lost gold mine," he ordered. "every light fixture, anything that has a bottom surface, starting with my desk here. and send this
RUSH
to our national labs and get a complete analysis what it senses and how it communicates." The jelly jar got a private jet ride across the country.

Two days later they knew what frequency it used to send a very low power pulse, when it had archived sufficient data. It wasn't until late that day they detected such a transmission, but with no directional fix. Getting everything set up to locate it took another day and two more burst transmissions, to localize it to the head of station's office.

Finally they tore the office apart. They disassembled the desk and other furniture, tore the couch to pieces, pulled up the carpeting and set up temporary lighting so they could rip the lighting fixtures out. Bare wires dangled from the ceiling.

Finally they pried the chair rail off the wainscoting and found it flattened and wedged up the crack from the bottom.

"Oh crap, it did a burst transmission when we uncovered it," a techie said.

"Why would it do that?"

"It probably had audio archived and transmitted video of the last few seconds. With my face up nice and close. I don't like that at all."

With it removed they set detectors in every room and waited. When a full day passed with no transmissions, they declared themselves clean. The order went out to check every agency building world-wide. Their detectors were not however, sensitive enough to discover any emissions from the parking lot.

 Attempts to trace the origins of the bugs ran up against the problem that there were already over fifty-thousand sold, with a dozen Japanese shops along the main drag in Akihabara selling them from eighteen dollars each in lots of a thousand, to two hundred and fifty dollars a single copy. One shop in Vancouver was already selling them grey market to early adapters, for five hundred dollars apiece. They carried no serial number.

* * *

Heather parked the rover looking out at April's lot. Jeff left the command chairs for the women and put a folding chair from the back between them. The sun was out of direct view behind the mountains to their right, so that side was in deep shadow. Ahead of them and to the left it was still brilliant with sunlight and the boundary was not a simple line, but a hash of long shadows, growing longer as they watched.

Jeff got in the supplies and opened three cans of self-heating stew, pulling the tabs and letting then sit to warm up. He opened a tin of brown bread, as well as small jars of strawberry jam and peanut butter. He set the plug in skillet to a hundred eighty degrees and cut slices of the dark brown bread to grill for dessert. By then it was time to stir each can of stew, the heat was generated in the container wall, but it would burn before the center got hot if not stirred. He could smell Heather was taking care of the coffee, the rich odors all filled the rover.