April 4: A Different Perspective (44 page)

"Perhaps," The General said, reluctantly, it would be better to rescind displaying the pins for now."

"I already did," Col. Allister admitted. "Sorry if I ran ahead of you. But what do we do about the brassards? If we wear false colors we risk friendly fire."

The general had no answer to that.

Chapter 35

"It's warm," John Love told his Commander, calling from the militia ship
Begger's Ride
.

"People or machinery?" Lu Lanakila asked from the command vessel
Silly Willy
standing off at a safer distance and relaying pix and data to Home.

"Could be either, not
too
hot for people," he added. "Look at that snout on the thing," John said as they glided in from the rear quarter.

"Hail them again," Lu instructed. "Ship and suit frequencies and a few others just to be sure they know we are talking. They had radar up before, so they know we are here."

"Nothing -  arrogant bastards."

"That framework is a rail gun," Lu told him. "That what they look like on a Navy ship, when you strip the weather cover off. But that looks to be about three times as long as a ship's. Don't get on the business end of that. In fact, burn it off with laser fire, when you get a view closer to the point it emerges."

John squeezed the controls gently, killing a little velocity toward the satellite, letting his angle of drift shift more forward. When he could almost see the base of the open lattice work projection from the front of the satellite, he had his gunner severe it. The man had to walk the beam across it three times before it parted. It was sturdier than it looked.

The cylindrical shape rotated slowly and with a steady motion that spoke of gyros rather than jets. There were no visible puffs of thrusters either. When it had rotated perhaps a third of a turn on its long axis it stopped.

"A USNA emblem came into sight from the other side when they rolled," John sent. They could see it themselves from the feed, but nobody complained about his commentary.

"He's doing a flip now. It moves slower on the long axis. That will bring the stub of the weapon to bear in maybe two minutes. Is it a danger with the extension cut off?"

"Yeah, it has an injection mechanism that starts the shot before it hits the charged rails. Pour laser fire in the opening and don't let him line up on you. It can still toss a projectile out at about seven hundred meters a second, if it's similar to a Naval unit."

John hit the thrusters for side movement, taking him out of the plane the stub was rotating in. It stopped and rotated briefly on the long axis. It obviously couldn't do both at once. His fire was melting metal around the weapon base, yellow hot globs floating off various directions. Suddenly there was a eruption of hot gas and debris from within.

"I think you probably heated up his projectile until the charge that opens the canister and spreads the shot ignited," Lu theorized. The satellite stopped turning, so something significant had happened.

"What do you want us to do?" John asked. "Go over and cut our way in?"

"No, no, no. If they are idiots or fanatics, they may have small arms and resist. See the radiator fins on the back? Just set your laser on a wide beam and pour low power into the cooling system. Not enough to breach it, just to overload the system. When it gets to be a sauna inside, they can come out or cook. Up to them and they have plenty of time to decide. If they come out armed, use the laser on them. We have enough martyrs for my taste. I don't want to lose anybody else. I read you fifteen hundred meters from them. Ease back a little as you paint them. If they self destruct I don't want them to take you out too.

"I really, really thought it would be Chinese," John said. "I guess we can't blame this one on Singh. How far back do you think is safe for a small nuke?

"Better make it five kilometers. A nuke wouldn't bust you right now, but why absorb any more radiation than you need to? Something big is happening in North America," Lu told him. "Didn't you see the news before we came out here?"

"No, they roused me in the middle of my night and I staggered to the ship without looking at anything I didn't have to. I let my second have the comm and slept a little more on the way out," he revealed. "Anybody wakes me up early, like these guys did, I'd just as soon put a missile up their butt and go home, begging your pardon if that doesn't meet doctrine."

"Take a look at the news feed. I don't think anything is going to happen for a few minutes."

"Oh crap!" John said out loud, when he found the picture of the White House on fire. "That's going to piss off a lot of the peasants."

"Really?" Lu asked. "I didn't think the general population was that fond of the current administration."

"They're not, but there's something about human nature. We pick sides. Even if both sides are great flaming jackasses, people still tend to pick one over the other, like it matters. Wiggen hasn't made them love her, but she hasn't desecrated national treasures either. Burning the White House is like dynamiting Mount Rushmore or melting down the Liberty Bell. People don't like you messing with their childhood symbols."

"Interesting, You might be right. Can you give me a temperature reading off the hull?"

"Just a hair over thirty-five degrees by the infrared emission," John told him.

"Excellent," Lu told them, "that's past a pleasant day on the beach."

It was another fifteen minutes before a suited figure came out the lock and held both empty hands up in front of him. The hull read forty-six degrees by then. "I give up," he said over suit radio.

"Send your best zero G man over and shut off his valves and throw his air bottle back in the airlock. It's too easy to put a bomb in one. If you want to take a bottle over to him it probably fits. He might feel safer to surrender. I wish we'd thought to make up a couple bottles with a sleepy mix. Make a note of that for next time. Put him in your freight module with the a second man and pressurize. Then peel him out of that suit and inspect it for suicide bombs, before you let him in your flight cabin."

"We have environmental conditioning in our hold. We have four couches we install for passengers when we need 'em. Why not just leave them back there?"

"You have the couches installed?"

"No, but I can hold down my acceleration on the way back. We actually have a bunch of small box freight we didn't have time to offload, but they can lay on top of it in their suits and pull the net over them. It won't be that uncomfortable."

"Do it."

"Turn around, I'm going to switch bottles on you," they heard their man tell the fellow.

"Anybody else in there?" he asked. "This boy has lieutenant's bars," he informed his ship.

"Captain Jacobs, my CO. I shot him in the back of the head when he was at the board," he said, voice cracking. "He was going to set off the charges to blow the satellite. I didn't see any point in it."

"Neither would I," his captor agreed, searching him carefully. He was a huge man, with a blonde beard and mustache, visible in his big faceplate. Even being in a hard suit didn't hide how big he was. Just the distance from arm joint to arm joint said how wide his shoulder were. He tossed a few belt tools in the airlock after the air bottle. "Here's the drill. You have no maneuvering pack. I'm a beam dog, call me Al and used to moving and jumping loose, or with equipment bigger than you. Cross your ankles and fold your arms across your chest and I'll handle you like a piece of construction material and take you to the freight module. You'll wait in there with my buddy, while I take pix and grab anything interesting in your sat here. Just so you understand, if it's booby-trapped inside, my friend will punch a small slit in your sleeve and shove you back out the hatch. You'll get to see how long you can pinch it off before you can't stay awake, or cramp up beyond holding it. Understand?"

"No traps," the man promised. "If I thought like that, I'd have just let him blow it."

"Makes sense," the rigger agreed. "But if you could count on people making sense life would be a lot simpler. Get set like I told you."

The man crossed his ankles and arms, floating free now, but Al grabbed him by the waist at the rear. He used the lock opening to brace and slowly turned him to face their ship which was just a specular glare of sun off the front ports, too far away to see a shape.

"You're going to jump that far?" the man asked voice unsteady.

"Hey, I do this for a living. I've got a butt pack on, but I'd jump unpowered and hit it if I had the time. I'd be embarrassed to
need
it. We won't take an hour to ease across today though, I'll push us a little with the pack. You never do much EV I take it?"

"We rig a line across for transfer. I've never been out of contact."

Al just snorted in disgust at that. He pushed the lieutenant away from him and pulled him back twice. "Seventy-five kilo?"

"Uh, the suit is twenty-two kilo and I was about fifty-six two weeks ago, but I lose weight in zero G, yes that sounds about right. You can really tell that from a shove?"

"After three years of pushing crap around all day? Yeah, I can shake a box of rivets and tell you how many left, within a half dozen. They favor little guys like you?" he asked. "No offense intended, it just surprised me how light you are. They have to build a custom suit for me and it's a pain in the butt sometimes."

"Very much so. They pick the smaller guys everything else being equal and even give us different PT requirements so the guys don't do a lot of lifting and work out so much that they bulk up."

"Here we go," Al warned him and pushed off smoothly.

* * *

"If you will examine your rental agreements, contracts for services and standards for Mitsubishi 3, you will find that nowhere does it define what orbital elements M3 will keep, what attitude it will assume, or what rotational acceleration it will impart at your deck level. It does guarantee air mix and pressure over a fairly broad range and potable water, waste water removal and some sort of food service, though no menu or caloric guarantee. The only really
fussy
standard for which they assume responsibility, is that they will supply clean, well regulated power, such as is needed by most modern electronic devices, at standard voltage and frequency. and they only guarantee ninety-five percent up time on
that
."

The man gaped at him, like a goldfish, suddenly cast out on the floor.

"Do you
read
your contracts?" Robert Lewis asked the man, disgusted. "Dear Lord, do you even read your credit card contracts, or your employment contracts?" The man's grim face told him he'd hit right on target with that question.

"What exactly do you do here in LEO, that you can't do out by L2?"

"My company grows crystals. It's proprietary. I can't say any more than that. I just don't
want
to live clear the other side of the moon!"

"I can't imagine why, but all I can suggest is, quit." The man ignored that.

"How long will it take to go home on leave?" the man asked. "I only get two weeks twice a year. If the travel time eats up all my leave, is it even worth trying to go home for two weeks? and can we even get fresh food and things, clear the far side of the moon?"

"Perhaps you should have asked those things
first
, instead of a big emotional outburst and threatening me. I know a few men who would stop listening further when threatened and tell you to send a second, to talk to his man, at that point."

The fellow blanched at that thought.

"But to address your worries, the conventional style shuttles will add about a day of travel to land on Earth. Trouble is there aren't any really suitable for the trip right now, so somebody is going to have to build or modify a few, really quickly. What will happen, right away, is the few fast couriers in service will transport people to another station or habitat in LEO and you will take one of the regular  shuttles down like always. The couriers are fast enough they will only take about six hours to drop you at say, New Las Vegas, or ISSII. It will be an added expense I grant you. Once you have lifted something to LEO that takes care of most of the energy cost to take it anywhere in space, short of Mars. It costs about fifteen percent more to take something to the moon, so taking something to lunar orbit, or one of the Lagrange points takes even less. Perhaps ten percent more. and while it is a dramatically different perspective, you are hardly off where the Sun or the Earth is a distant point of light. We will be making a halo orbit between the L2 point and the moon," he demonstrated with his hands, "so we will constantly be looking at the rear of the moon from an angle and the marble of the earth will be constantly visible in the distance, past the edge of the moon. Does that help address any of your concerns?"

"A little," the man admitted, still unhappy. "I'm glad to hear we'll still be in sight of Earth. I suppose it won't be too bad, even though it seems it will be a little gloomy, always looking at the dark side of the moon."

"The back side gets just as much sun as the near side," Robert assured him.
Where do they find these idiots?
he thought. "When this side is in shadow do you imagine the other side is not illuminated? Do you think they turn out the light? Where did you ever get the idea the far side was dark?" he asked, honestly baffled.

"I, uh, I'm not sure. I just heard the phrase and it kind of stuck with me. That's good," he acknowledged, the look on his face saying he was finally figuring out what an idiot he'd been and was embarrassed. "It's not near as bad as I figured. Thanks for explaining," he said and left as quickly as he could find the door.

Robert Lewis leaned back and rubbed his eyes, weary. He wondered how many more of those characters were still working their nerve up to come see him? He'd had one fellow already this morning who wanted to know why Mr. Muños would not call an Assembly and put moving to a vote. It was making for a long hard day, on top of damage assessments and reports to Mitsubishi. They at least, for a miracle, were not riding him or questioning his decision.