April (14 page)

Jeff poured more tea for them without replying. April waited, guessing what he had in mind. He raised his cup. "To the three of us, our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor, in friendship and loyalty. I propose our alliance and declare our revolution."

Heather touched her cup to his. "To victory."

April joined her cup to touch both of theirs. " And confusion to our enemies," she added hopefully.

They all drank and regarded each other quietly, savoring the moment.

"It's settled then," Jeff said. "Now, what do we
do
about protecting these little gadgets and deal with being spied on?"

"I think you're in the same position I was after my encounter with the spy," April said. "You don't have the resources to deal with him yourself, so you use the man who is charged with protecting M3 and everyone who lives here. Get Jon involved, because he needs to know the spy was looking for something more."

"You didn't hear how concerned he was about the room he had stayed in. They were really worried he might have left a booby trap, or biohazard in there for someone. Well, seems to me this room, which he knew belonged to somebody involved with the neutrinos, is a bigger danger for that, than the one at the hotel. If he made a trap there it might get just anyone. A cleaning maid, or the next guest. You were smart enough not to go in the room right?" he nodded agreement.

"But we sat here and ate dinner with the door cracked open. What if he left some biological agent for your dad? The whole place could be contaminated."

"It's been since Sunday evening I found it, almost two days now and I slept here and don't have any symptoms," he offered.

"And you might not. An incubation period of three or four days is common. You know that," she gently chided him. "I don't mean to say I would tell Jon everything about these." April said, laying her hand on the box. "Tell him what he needs to know and stop before you get too specific about what these do."

"I think we need to keep the relationship between we three secret for now," Jeff said, uncomfortable.

Well Jon already saw us together tonight and others will too. We were innocent of any conspiracy then, we just need to act the same now. We don't need to tell anything about us or our goals, or what these
do
for that matter. They are yours and you need them guarded, what does it really matter what they do? He might have some idea where they would be safer. But I would talk to him frankly about the legal problems with the Rock, your dad is handling. We don't know for sure yet that isn't a factor too. He has other investors here too who might need more protection."

Heather looked at April. "Do you think if it comes to rebellion Jon will be on our side?"

"I think it depends on how it happens. He respects authority and is sworn to it. Yet he regarded the spy as an enemy, even though he is probably operating with the full authority of the government. But he was here endangering the people Jon is sworn to protect with no warning. He was upset about that. If they just start shooting at the Rock, I think it will offend him. But if they declare their intentions and occupy the Rock after giving notice they are doing so in accord with law, then he may feel any rebels are getting what they deserve, if they resist."

"I admit, when I talked to him about the spy we disagreed on details, but in the end we agreed to be on the same side. It wasn't as total a commitment as ours just now, but you saw how he acted when I was in trouble at the cafeteria. I don't think it would be too hard to get you two under the same umbrella of protection, so to speak."

"But what about you Jeff? From what I saw at the buffet you have studied some sort of martial art under Jon. Doesn't it already give you some sort of friendship?"

Jeff seemed flustered. "April it's so complicated. Jon my instructor, is not any other Jon I know. It is so formal and the rules and thinking are so different, it is like two different people when I deal with him robed, or unrobed. I don't mean this as a negative, but I'm seeing Jon has an amazing ability to compartmentize things in his mind. He seems to switch viewpoints between his official life and his personal interests, more than most people would be able. How about
you
calling Jon on our behalf and telling him about the room," he indicated with a gesture, "and see if he can help us with keeping these generators safe?"

"Smart," said Heather. "I told you he is smart. We saw how the April-oriented Jon acts today, so that's the Jon we enlist. You need to show her the other pieces also," she reminded Jeff.

"You both trust me to arrange this?" April asked.

"I think we are past the question," Heather said. "Yeah, take care of it for us."

"Just checking, because I want to call Jon before it's late and he's in bed. I don't want to drag him out of bed again if I can help it. I know he'll want to see the room right away."

"Go ahead," said Jeff. "We have some other stuff to show you then."

April opened her pad on the counter. She didn't make a point of showing them, but she didn't cover up either. She punched in 898989. She expected his apartment again, but it was an office, with some diplomas and certificates on the wall behind him.

"Jon's Sanitary Services," he said perfectly deadpan.

April thought about going along with the joke, but didn't have the nerve. She was still struggling too much to just be credible with him.

"Jon, I have some more information on our jumper," she said straight away. "Jeff here found his father's bedroom trashed and it has the uh, same garbage drawn on the screen," she didn't want to say SEAL thinking of snoopers, "It's a day old, almost two actually, but I remembered how careful you were with the hotel room. What do you want to do?"

"Have any of you gone in the room?" he asked, immediately concerned.

"No," April answered. "Jeff opened the door with a pen, instead of his hand and we all looked in, but we closed the door and he did not fan it around, he opened and closed it slow. However, he slept here last night and we all sat and ate dinner in the apartment."

"I will be there in ten minutes or so with a team. Don't touch each other. Don't go back outside for anything," he hesitated. "You did pretty good," he added and the screen blanked.

"I want to show you these too before he gets here," Jon said. He pulled another small box from the larger one and produced another tube. The part he removed was similar to the first, but had no tubes in or out and the metal contacts were different. "Heather tells me how smart you are. So you tell me what this one does." He didn't seem to mean it as a challenge to her ability, like some ego driven people would have enjoyed doing, hoping in her failure they would seem elevated.

April took it and turned it in her hands. "Well unless you have discovered how to suck power from the vacuum, there's no way to fuel it so I would say it is an ultra capacitor. It probably stores quite a few joules more than a regular commercial one, to have these big leads just like the other. She brags on how smart you are too, but I think we will find it is in different areas for each of us."

"It would be good actually, for us to bring different talents," Jeff claimed.  But you guessed pretty well. This device isn't mine; this is something we got from our friends on the Moon. We traded with them. We granted them a license on some software they badly needed and they grant us a limited license to make these. It works out nicely, because they very much complement each other. I would call it a battery or accumulator though. It stores much more than any capacitor and makes NO neutrinos," he added.

"How many amp hours?"

"It's not a very good way to rate it. Do you understand E= mc²?" he asked.

"Of course I do," she said indignantly. "I'm not ignorant!"

"Well, when this size is charged up, it will mass somewhat less than two grams more than when empty. Or if you want some real strange bastard unit, we could use kilowatt centuries."

April let out a long, low appreciative whistle. "And how fast can you charge and discharge it?"

"Well now, there's a problem with that. You don't want to damage or melt the substrate," he said.  "If you do it will release the whole charge in a couple microseconds. That's not a problem with the fusion generator."

She looked at the piece in her hand and thought. "But you could short it out and melt it on purpose right?"

"Yes, you're quick to see the implications," Jeff admitted. "And if our lunar friends had seen this problem coming, they probably would have never traded design details and rights with us. They found out the danger the hard way, by pushing it past its limits. Fortunately, they had it fail well away from their base and the boom was small enough to explain away as a meteor strike."

"They hadn't stored all that much in the one that failed because it was a lot smaller. You can make them a lot smaller or bigger. Once they knew it could be destabilized they were pretty much obligated to tell us. What if we pushed one too hard and vaporized M3 because they didn't warn us?"

"It would take a lot of power to charge it up to that dangerous a level."

Jeff just gestured at the fusion generator.

"Well, yeah, point taken. Two grams." She started trying to calculate in her head.

"On the short side," he reminded her. "But instead of joules or watt hours, call it forty Kiloton, for the military mind."

April looked at the device with fresh horror.

"And how many was Hiroshima?"

"About fifteen."

"Kargil?"

"About a thousand actually, but it's not easy to compare, because it's not linear at all, you need to cube the power to double the blast damage you see. You get quickly diminishing returns. This is why superpowers use several small bombs, instead of one big one, it's much more efficient," he said with seeming cold indifference.

"But the big thing for us is not that they can be made into a weapon. Rather they very much compliment our miniature fusion generator. The generator can run at constant output and the storage device lets us pull high peak power off the combination. Of course it can be used that way for other sources of energy. The Loonies have almost limitless solar power to charge them. Still, we have a window of opportunity to use the two together, before the device becomes known publicly. That may be quite a while, they are holding this one close, since they found that wee problem."

"Jeff, I think you should get one of these fusion devices to a safe place with whatever documentation about how they work and are made, because somebody is looking for them. The Loonie device you should hide too, even if they don't have anything to do with the neutrino emissions. Nobody is
looking
for them, but they might find them looking for the other. You don't have any right to reveal them to third parties. But I'd like you to keep some handy to use. You may need to use them for what I want you two to build next," she said.

"I was thinking something similar, so let's leave some samples in a box and I will put the rest away before Jon gets here," he shuffled the containers, leaving one of the smaller boxes on the table. "I'll send the extras and Loonie stuff home with Heather. There's no reason anyone should know about them, or imagine she's holding something for me."

"So what is it you want built, we were supposed to talk about tonight?" He asked, when he returned, amused at how the original purpose of meeting had been eclipsed.

"I'm thinking of a small case, disguised to look like a pad or inventory taker, with a powerful laser as a personal weapon. It should be adjustable, so it can scan first through a range of frequencies and read the infrared signature back, to see what color is absorbed well and then lock on to pulse. It should have a handle and trigger that folds out and a view screen for aiming which can zoom. A low power aiming laser, a designator like Jon's Taser has, would be nice also."

"That sounds good," Heather interjected. "Do us copies, just like the scanners."

"What you are asking for wouldn't have been very practical without one of these cells," Jeff said. "I could have made it, but it would have depleted any power source I could use, in three or four shots. I can add another improvement. When a laser strikes a target like sheet metal, the shock wave from the plasma boiled off the surface is often what does the real damage, but the plasma blocks any more of the light from getting through. I'll break the beam into short pulses and vary the time between them so it can find the physical resonate frequency of the target and shake it apart with the timed pulses. With that sort of a chopped beam I can give you a setting which gives you a pseudo continuous beam, without overheating too fast."

"How about you, Heather? Any features you want on them?" Jeff inquired.

"Yeah. I want mine in a designer color," she joked. "Something not too shiny and hard to see. And if it's not too hard to do I would like a taste lock, like on a door, so someone else can't use it unless I punch numbers in a keypad to release it. You'd unlock it to use it in a p-suit by the keypad," she suggested.

"You know, these cells I have here are actually too big for this use, but they're what we have made and I will use them for us if I can't make smaller. We have to get together and talk about making a bunch, about a hundredth as big as these if we're to have a bunch of them for our cause." He stopped talking then, because the door chime sounded. "Unlock," Jeff told the house.

"Come on in," he invited.

Chapter 9

The woman who entered the Singh apartment wore a shiny paper jump suit with hood. It was complimented by a disposable breathing mask, with a plastic eye shield. She stopped inside the door and kneeled to unroll a soft pack on the floor.  First she took a pink aluminized Mylar pouch out and ripped it open. The cassette inside she inserted in a plastic case and switched the device on. An LED on the face started blinking amber and she laid it back down.

She retrieved another calculator size plastic case and opened a lidded plastic tray before approaching Jeff. April noticed the suit sort of stood away from her and had a sharp odor like she smelled in Heather's work area. She realized then the suit was one of those biohazard suits, that carry an electrostatic charge to repel airborne particulates like bacteria. She had read about them but never seen one before.  Her voice was somewhat muffled in the mask. It didn't have a booster speaker.