April 8: It's Always Something (3 page)

April provided housing for Gunny. She had a rather large private cubic for Home, and he had his private room and tiny bath set off with temporary partitions. Housing was so expensive now she should probably just provide that for his services, and skip the cash retainer, but April would feel like a cheapskate to reduce his income even though he had other work now. It wasn't
that
much to carry.

April had steady income from both the businesses she held in common with Jeff and Heather, and a bunch of little businesses her brother willed her. Neither did she have any really expensive vices or hobbies, other than being a coffee snob. Well, she'd spent some money on art by Lindsey, but that had increased in value so much that she'd been offered ten Solar for the big one of a kind drawing in her living room. She still had a chunk of cash Eddie had given her when she'd gone down to Earth. She felt safer to hold that in reserve rather than invest it with what she held in common with Jeff and Heather. That would be complicated. They after all both had other things they held apart and neither of them had increased their common holdings..

Gunny was a real asset to have on site. Passive insurance you might say. A sort of security system. The possibility Gunny might be home reduced the possibility anyone would consider trying to invade their space, either covertly in a black operation, or a full frontal assault.

His worth as a home security system was all the more true since Jan Hagen had leaked the video of Gunny being kidnapped by the North Americans last year. It made the rounds of Home and then inevitably, like anything let loose on the net, found its way to Earth sites. It was rather amusing, at least to her, Gunny found it less so. He found it an affront to his dignity and didn't seem to get that others found it frightening.

The Americans had a corrupt data base, nothing new there, their government and military nets were a rats nest of old mismatched hardware and software, that translated between incompatible systems. Their agencies were too stubborn or broke to abandon and consolidate them. They'd told the American military post on ISSII that Gunny was still a deserter, after he'd been honorably discharged by Presidential decree.

They were a bit over zealous to Taser him from behind in the international zone of ISSII and carry him away to their interest section. That irritated Jan Hagen, Head of Security for ISSII. Jan was on the short list April kept of people who you don't irritate or count favors owed back and forth too closely. Jan Oppositional Disorder was a defect she'd seen too many display that proved fatal. She'd seen Chinese officers take a space walk out the airlock without the encumbrance of a suit for provoking Jan only slightly more than the North Americans had by grabbing Gunny.

The video didn't capture them Tasing Gunny from behind. It started with a security camera view in the officer's cabin, made into an improvised brig, where they'd thrown the unconscious Gunny. He was sprawled limp on the bunk in his shorts, having been stripped and searched before they cuffed him hand and foot and tossed him there. He woke up slowly and rolled over examining his prison and his frown growing slowly worse until he was showing teeth. He sat up and swung his legs off the bunk, set his mouth in a hard line, tucked his arms in front of him and spread them wide suddenly, snapping the cuff chain in a single clean jerk.

The camera caught a full frontal shot of his chest with muscles taut and defined. He looked like the drawings of muscle groups in an anatomy textbook. However, what April always marveled at was his collection of scars. In fact, it fascinated her so, she'd watched it through three times in a row when Jon Davis, Home's head of security, first obtained a copy and shared it with her. April really enjoyed seeing Gunny snap that chain.

The officer assigned to watch Gunny could be heard trying to tell his superior on com that they might have a little problem. He was being too professional and matter-of-fact about it and consequently made no impression on the man how dire the situation was at all. A little terror in the voice might not have been misplaced, under the circumstances. He got blown off, which delayed an effective response.

Gunny shuffled over with ankle cuffs still on and used the toilet in the officer's cabin, back mercifully to the camera. He tested the ankle cuffs, but pulling one up and one down apparently hurt his shins too badly to tolerate. In the end he used his hands to help in breaking the chain across the corner of the desk. He pawed through the desk looking for assets, but they'd thought to clean it out.

The bunk was secured along the bulkhead on the long side but the opposite edge was held up by two short lengths of tubing tacked to the deck at the corners. Gunny grabbed the edge of the bunk in the middle and heaved up on it. It bent and the corner supports leaned in, but it held. Gunny stopped trying, stood back and glowered at it in thought. After a moment he stomped on the peak he'd created and drove it back down and toward the deck a bit, inverted to a Vee now.

Foiled, he changed his tactics, grabbing the corner and wrenching it back and forth. The edge rail and end posts went back and forth between alternate parallelogram shapes until the weld in the deck broke with a crack and the whole framework came loose from the deck and bulkhead.

Gunny ignored the locked hatch to the corridor. He'd never even tried it to see if it was locked. He instead attacked the bare bulkhead into the next cabin with the folded up bunk rails as a battering ram. That was where the fellow monitoring the video camera had been stationed, conveniently close so he could respond and go into Gunny's cell if need arose.

He didn't need to respond. Gunny was coming to him.

The video then switched to the feed from the adjoining room. The watch stander could be heard urgently requesting a security response. The bulkhead bulged with a loud thud and got a crease drawn on it from the other side. There's was inexplicable pause, followed by a flurry of blows that formed an irregular bulge in the bulkhead, which grew with each blow. The metal was surprisingly strong and flexed back and forth a lot before the bunk frame finally tore a rip in the sheet metal. The end of the bunk frame was stuck briefly in the new hole and swung back and forth as Gunny worked it loose and pried the hole wider.

By then two more North Americans had joined the duty guard on the wide angle camera feed. They all three held Tasers held in front of them, but stayed back as far as possible from the widening breech. Gunny's bare foot appeared, kicking the edge of the opening to fold the metal back. The hole was only about a quarter meter across, but the one guard saw a shot and fired through the gap. He connected because the foot retracted and was a moment of silence.

One of the new fellows then ordered the duty guard to go around to the prisoner's room and recuff him. The guard refused the direct order in profane terms and invited the fellow to do it himself. About that time the effect of the Taser wore off and Gunny could be heard through the opening describing in loud detail what he was going to do with the man's Taser when he got through the wall. It was unlikely the weapon would fit, but then none of them would have believed you could rip your way through a bulkhead like this either.

Gunny's hand reappeared holding the leg ripped off the bunk frame and used it as a mallet to widen the hole. None of the men chose to shoot this time at the small target a moving hand presented.

With the opening big enough Gunny did a clean dive through it, only getting a few small cuts since the edges were all peeled away from his side. He threw the piece of pipe at one of them, knocking his aim off. The other two got a clean shot at him and took him down again.

This time they cuffed his hands behind him, managing to get three pairs around his wrists and two around his ankles with another stretched between the sets.

"Get medical down here to sedate this...guy," the one in charge demanded. He still had wires on Gunny and appeared ready to shock him again if he came to.

"Dear God..are all the Homies like this brute?" the other guard asked. It was interesting, because April had never heard anyone call them Homies before. But once the video circulated it was a common expression now, just a few months later.

Gunny tonight was nothing like he was in the video. He was relaxed as he ever got, leaning against the wall, scanning the room occasionally like he was on a timer, and content with his thoughts, not reading or listening to anything. He didn't look like the enraged ogre in the video at all. He was however slowly squeezing and relaxing his grip on an exercise ball. He'd been doing that with his right hand ever since he'd lost it on an Earth mission and been forced to have it re-grown last year. April noticed that he'd switched to working the ball with both hands recently. His skin on the new hand looked just like the other one now, and his nails had grown thick again after looking thin and delicate. In the video you could see his right hand was still pale and hairless, but that hadn't seemed to impair him significantly ripping a hole in the bulkhead.

"I'd think your hand has to be back to full strength by now," April commented.

Gunny brought the blue ball up, like Hamlet examining Yorick's skull. "I want to keep my grip at its best in both hands. It's useful in my line of work. Anyway, it's relaxing."

April frowned..."Wasn't it a red ball recently? Just a few days ago? What did you do, wear the other one out?"

Gunny looked embarrassed for a fleeting moment. A rarity as he had no shame. "The blue is the next grade of resistance. I wasn't paying attention and stuck my thumb through the old red one."

April tried to imagine how much force
that
took, and decided to drop it. Gunny was already embarrassed so it was only polite to drop it. It was nice that he didn't evade her with a 'little' lie.

"You didn't get dessert," April observed. It wasn't a question, but Gunny knew that was her intent.

"I picked up a few kilos. I know... I needed to," He added, before April could say it. He'd lost weight and stopped working out while they'd been on short rations. That was really bad for a security professional. "But I fear the last couple kilos weren't muscle," Gunny said, laying his hand on a flat stomach that looked hard and fit to April's eye. He also didn't have as many gene mods as April. The faster metabolism being one of them. The ones a security professional needed came first. But that was for him to decide and very personal. They weren't cheap either, and the ones that didn't involve aging...well, you could get them later on easy enough if you could spare the money and time.

"I could stand to work out a little more," April admitted, rather than argue with him.

"Yes, you could," Gunny agreed. "In your spare time," he added to soften it.

They laughed together at that often shared phrase.

Barak, coming off work from what they called the cabbage mines, regarded the posted work schedule with some annoyance. They had him set for twelve off and then a twelve hour shift to the rover garage. Alice was set for an eight hour shift to Central environmental, starting two hours after his start time, and Deloris started a lift to Home when Barak was getting off. That was all switched around from before, and they hadn't gotten a full off day together since they'd started. And there was no telling what things would be like in a week. Everything could easily be changed tomorrow. Every time they tried to create a reasonable schedule either something broke, or there was a delay getting supplies, or someone got sick. They ended up waving at each other in passing or needing to be carefully quiet in the apartment when one of them needed to sleep. There wasn't much of anywhere to go to if they left their apartment to avoid making noise. On the other hand, a couple times Barak had been there all alone and gone to the cafeteria just to be around some people and noise. He didn't care to be isolated for long at all.

Neither his foreman Geraldo nor his boss Mo were being jerks about it, they went from crisis to crisis and if anything worked crazier hours than Barak or his roomies. He had to admit neither he nor the girls had been asked to report for work unsafe from lack of sleep.

When the three of them returned from the second ice ball mission to Jupiter last year they'd expected to have a nice payout waiting for them. The plan had been for them to take a vacation all together before worrying about finding further employment. Their pay contract however, was in USNA dollars. When they'd left in 2087 that had been fine. But on their return there was all sorts of chaos in the banking systems. Several countries had gone to depreciating currencies, even the European group, and USNA dollars had been devalued. They found themselves near broke instead of flush.

It wasn't the orderly devaluation like Gunny had described to them about going through when he was Barak's age. That had been ten to one and everything had been adjusted all at the same time. The numbers in your accounts had dropped 90% and there was a thirty day window to trade old currency for new. But almost all debt got devalued by the same amount.

Just a few folks got caught in legal exclusions that left them holding full debts with no relief. Of course those few people were ruined. Most of them were people who were so wealthy there wasn't much public sympathy for them. By some coincidence they tended to be political enemies of the people in power. Gunny, back then, had been a lower rank sailor, who rarely had much money left by the next payday anyway. That made it a lot easier.

Other people had found themselves with way too much cash to explain. There was a sudden but short term opportunity for a lot of poor people to launder money for cash holding friends. A lot of money in foreign countries never got converted, which quite a few people said was intended all along.

The current devaluation was less orderly. The official rate dropped daily, sometimes by the hour at the end. The official exchange rates were defended, but when the black market rate and the central bank rate got too far apart, money just stopped flowing. Other countries had fought and lost this sort of a contest many times over the years, but to the United States of North America it was not just damaging, it was embarrassing. They'd thought themselves beyond such market forces.

All three of them could have gotten other jobs. Alice as an environmental tech for Mitsubishi itself, a very desirable employer, but even though they offered a generous cash housing allowance there was simply no housing to be had on Home. That's probably why the position was still open. Alice was less than thrilled at the idea of sleeping on the deck in some stranger's living room every evening.

Delores could have had an orbit to orbit pilot's position for FedEx. She'd have had to take a room on New Las Vegas when she docked there, or a hot slot on ISSII or The Turnip – the French hab. If she got stuck at Home with a layover the FedEx crews were reportedly sleeping on their shuttles for now. They got the per diem for a hot slot paid still, but there was rarely one open. They simply strung a tube hammock in the shuttle, and made use of one of the few public restrooms or a friend's shower to clean up.

Jeff Singh offered Barak employment, but not on Home. Jeff already had a family in his apartment - in fact the wife and children of Barak's section boss, Mo Pennington. His wife was as resistant to moving to the moon as she had been to coming up from Earth. Barak wasn't holding his breath waiting to see her here so Jeff would regain his apartment. Jeff was living in his business office with another employee, and no room there for Barak either. The attraction of the moon job was not only that they had generous living cubic to offer at low cost, but that they also had a labor shortage and Deloris and Alice could easily find employment at decent pay too. Right now being broke together sounded better than scattering to the winds with no funds and no friends at hand they could count on. Being effectively broke, living pay to pay alone, invited disaster from the slightest mishap until they had funds built up again. Best to be safe.

Barak likely could have found work on Home from someone besides Jeff. His mother had kept his room unchanged so
he
had a place to stay. Indeed when he got back his mother had been off to a lunar colony doing some commissioned art work, and the door had still been set to open to his palm. Even his personal items he'd left behind were still in the drawers and storage bins. His mother had a generous apartment, but enough income she had no desire to ruin her privacy by taking in roomers or subdividing the cubic like so many others were doing.

Barak stayed at his old home ten days, and had his shipmates off the
Yuki-onna
with him as his guests. Finding his mom off on a commission, he hadn't asked her for permission to have house guests. When she announced her work on the moon was wrapping up and she'd be home in a few days he had to do something. There was no way he wanted to ask her to allow his friends to stay. Even one would have been presumptuous, two were impossible.

He hadn't wanted to return to his mother's home and his old room in any case. He didn't really want to be the stereotypical young man still living at home. He got along fine with his mom, but he was enjoying his new independence. If he stayed he was pretty sure his mom would
try
to treat him more like an adult, she was
pleased
with his willingness to assert adult status, but it was her cubic and her rules. He would feel stifled, and he really doubted she would've been indifferent to his having two young ladies as roommates. The fact they were both slightly older than him just aggravated it. She might assume they were taking advantage of his youth although neither were
that
much older.

When he broke the news to them that his mom was returning Barak was relieved to find they both immediately understood the problem without a painfully detailed explanation. Neither asked why they couldn't stay or why that created a problem. It was one of the things he liked about them, that they were more experienced than him, and maybe a little smarter.

Delores demonstrated that perceptiveness by cutting right to the heart of the matter.

"OK, we're agreed it's much smarter and safer to stay together for support. If one of us gets sick or our new job doesn't work out, two can carry one for a few weeks on our immediate income until they recover. It looks like the moon is the only choice that lets us do that right now. I'm willing to go there if that's where we can stay together. I have no desire to travel as a permanent thing with no home base. Maybe later when we have a bankroll and the economy is a little better we can all find better opportunities. Are you in, Alice?"

"I'm in," Alice agreed, and so they'd come to Central.

Jeff wanted him to continue formulating hiring guides and crew structures for very long voyages. He was enthused at Barak's idea of researching the pertinent history of sailing crews in that age of exploration. Barak wasn't a quiet studious sort by nature, for research to occupy his full time. Jeff also wanted him to share his time helping other people for vacuum suit work and construction in tunnels and cubic. It would be a shame to waste his expertise and he'd get enough hours to keep his suit ratings current.

But Barak's experience so far was that there was no trouble getting enough hours to stay certified. Rather, they seemed to need him to help out on pretty much a full time basis. To the point he wasn't making any progress on Jeff's project. It wasn't a problem yet, because Jeff didn't have a starship sitting waiting on a crew. He was candid that he didn't even have a workable drive or theory to make one yet, though it was a goal. If Jeff got unhappy about the lack of progress Barak had his time sheets archived. One look at them would explain what he'd been doing with all his hours.

The truth was Barak was enjoying trying a variety of new things. He'd filled in with rover drivers as their backup driver until they reported him qualified as a primary driver. He'd been a helper to the boring machine mechanics, and helped service an airlock when that specialist needed a second set of hands. He'd aided in planting trays of onions, radishes and cabbages in clean room conditions, when he'd never before had any idea how one started crops. He'd even drawn a liter of aging whiskey one day to forward to Home for testing, and tasted it himself out of curiosity. It was awful.

Barak's shipmates were experiencing less diversion from their primary jobs, but they still occasionally found themselves assigned to other duties. Alice worked on environmental systems, but also got called to work on the sealed systems for agriculture, which maintained very different conditions than inhabited cubic. Indeed, some of the growing tunnels had to be entered in suits or at least with a breathing mask. She even had occasion to service a shuttle that had a catastrophic environmental failure while sitting on their field loading freight.

Deloris too had been diverted to fly other routes than the lunar shuttle runs she expected. On several occasions she had been loaned out to other carriers, and on one occasion she'd diverted the landing shuttle from a Home delivery to an orbit to orbit job. The cargo had been hot enough not to worry about  the extra expense of using a landing shuttle in a different configuration.

They all had to be flexible, but discussing it after every major disruption and crisis, they all concluded it was still a better decision than splitting up and going their own ways. They were being paid in Solars and most of their living expenses were covered or cheap. If they'd stayed on Home the majority of their income would have gone to rent. None of them even thought of owning their own housing instead of shared. That was an impossible dream for the indefinite future.

* * *

"Stuffed grape leaves, and Syrian rice?" April exclaimed. "I know you've gotten back to lifting a lot of common goods, but I'm surprised to see these even though they aren't very bulky. I'm still waiting for Ruby to get some big bell peppers to stuff. She does those so well I really miss them."

"Good guess," Jeff allowed, "but those are zucchini leaves from the moon. You have to catch them early before they get tough, but they work just fine. The chopped stalks bulk out soups and I understand they even sneak a little bit of them in lasagna."

"I didn't know anything but the squash was edible," April said. It didn't seem to put her off them.

"We're finding out all sorts of edible plants, or parts of them, are wasted on Earth. But if you search for ethnic food recipes and really old cook books you find out the whole plant was often used before food was mass produced and centrally processed. We're not going back to wasting so much," Jeff promised. "If anything we will develop varieties that have better leaves and stalks as well as the fruit. The same with a lot of other things besides zukes. Seeing all the secondary products, I don't think it is going to be as many years as I previously thought, until we have rabbits and chickens, maybe even pigs."

"Pigs stink," April said, wrinkling her nose up.

"So do people," Jeff sort of agreed, "but we manage."

For some reason April found that hilarious.

* * *

Dear Mr. Bowman,

I'm replying to your expression of interest to me about job opportunities in your bank account message form. I've read your brief resume and checked with your references. Pending a face to face and a medical, you are exactly the sort of hire we'd like. As you mentioned, the problem is getting a lift to orbit. We are not providing transportation from our very limited lift capacity. We have one small Earth landing shuttle in operation and it is badly backlogged.

I am aware some people have had success lifting from the Canary Islands. This would require traveling to Spain and securing a ticket there or on the islands themselves. There's an informal bidding process and it isn't assured of success or a set price. Europe is still in some disarray from the flu, but the Canaries have avoided the worst of it due to deliberate isolation.

The other possibility is to contact your previous workmates and see if anyone  will confide in you a plan to cease employment. If they quit without announcing their intent before departing for an Earth side visit or vacation they will be issued a return voucher. The travel vouchers are a bearer license and always have been, mostly because they are not redeemable for cash from Mitsubishi. There is however an informal market in them. You might be able to arrange to purchase one from the retiree. That imposes a small burden on Mitsubishi, but they are aware of this custom, and choose to allow this to continue as a perk. They have first call for seats on their own shuttles and trades seats with other lifting agencies on Earth. It will not leave them short needed personnel.