April (50 page)

It was a task not everyone involved had been eager to assume, given what failure could mean to careers and even entire bureaucracies. The military solutions they devised were predictably different than what a civilian agency would have used. They also worked - so far. The reality of current politics was, almost nobody made a live appearance to the public or press anymore, unless they were the number three executive or lower in their organization. The assassinations of several tobacco executives and several CEO's who had left entire industries stripped of their pension funds earlier in the century, had made the same sort of precautions standard for large corporations also.

The President might appear before the nation sitting in the Oval Office. But the current reality was a flimsy White House was too open to a missile attack, to have the man sitting there in a known, targetable location at a set time. The journalist who reported the actual absence of the great man at his desk while appearing to be there live on national TV, was now working as a termite control technician in Tallahassee. The Magic of Electronics had been bypassed by him with a simple telescope, because someone forgot to close the drapes.

So when the President at his working desk, received his appointments secretary and went over the outline of his day, it was as his protective services preferred, in a deep, deep, bunker, somewhere beneath the hills of West Virginia.

The secretary hid it well, but his dominant feeling was one of dread and fear. Nothing satisfied President Hadley anymore and a flare up of his temper had become something everyone around him feared. More than the man was removed from the public eye. His actions were so shielded from scrutiny, that basically his whim had the power of law now.

After detailing the lack of progress being made in the secret civil war in Quebec, the briefing moved on to problems with pouching of mineral deposits in the deep ocean and how permits were let to grant rights to mine historic landfills for recoverable resources. The demands of Historians to preserve artifacts from the dumps was slowing down the reprocessing and adding too much to the costs.

There was another bill coming before Congress which his party wanted defeated, hiking the permit fees for printing out permanent hard copies of any document and granting credits and incentives for reusable print media. There was a bill also of concern, which would add several more trees to the endangered species list, including Black Walnut and Boxwood. There was considerable pressure to make genetic testing at the border a requirement for admission to the Continent. The purpose was to deny entry to anyone who showed nonhuman sequences in their genome. Several cases were in the courts, protesting the law was applied to people who carried spontaneous mutations. The president felt allowing a sample to be taken when applying for a visa was sufficient.

"About the matter with the asteroid, Roger. Are we on track for a smooth acquisition of that resource and no problems with the Japanese over it?"

"Yes sir. Still moving forward and they are making no claim to it. It was entirely a matter of private parties staking a claim. The principals just happened to be residents of Mitsubishi 3. Even though some of them work for the company, it was a matter of private sector investment, which simply conflicted with long established international law. And it is the American subsidiary in any case. There is some problem on the Second International Space Station which seems related. There is a Chinese national, a lady scientist, who is attempting to defect to Mitsubishi 3 and they are upset. We're going to arrest all the people involved and sort it out. Do you think we should offer to return the lady, before she has a chance to get to M3 and claim asylum?"

"Well as refreshing as it is to see someone defecting
to
us, it might be better to toss a bone to the Chinese before it complicates things. Now is no time to allow one person to distract us. Emphasize we will hand her over, after
we
arrest her. No use in letting them get too cocky. You don't know what field she works in, to have them so upset?"

"No. She's Tibetan. Her ethnicity might be part of it. They're still touchy about Tibet. But what can it matter? She's just coming alone and you know these people can't develop anything today without a budget of billions and a staff of thousands."

"Yes, I wish we could count on a few youthful geniuses, to invent whole new industries in their garage, like they did a hundred years ago. The economy could use a dose of it, but I'm afraid those days are gone forever."

Frank thought he would not be surprised if he got a ticket from a Homeland Defender, if he so much as parked crooked in his garage, much less invented anything in it outside of zoned use. The old bat across the street brazenly spied on him from her window with binoculars, even though he worked for the White House. But he didn't say anything. To complain about anything was to be suspect in one's loyalties.

Chapter 25

Easy and April had considered all the possible weaknesses in their homemade stealth conversion. They turned the ship, so the nozzles of the engines were away from any radars mounted on a pursuing ship. They angled the forward ports so they would probably reflect anything clear of both the radiating vessel and LEO itself and they hoped nothing in the antennas would effectively reflect a signal back to a search radar. They were silent in the radio spectrum themselves and would watch passively for any other vessels. They prepared the machine gun for action and tied it down with elastic cord ready to clamp on the lip of the open lock. Eddie had also been trained in use of the two small Russian anti-tank missiles. The missiles and gun depended on them closing to very short range, to fight effectively. It was also necessary they pump down the whole cabin.

While they still had their helmets open they polled their passengers.

"April has the thought we are in trouble as deep as we can go and there isn't much worse they can do to us than they already are able and willing. Given we are certain they are going to attack M3, her thought is to take advantage of our position and damage the USNA and China as deeply as we can, by attacking their satellites before we burn back home. Perhaps our efforts would inspire resistance on M3, or it might just add to the laundry list of charges. I'm already in as much trouble as a pilot can be, refusing traffic instructions from every agency that has an interest. How do you folks feel?"

"If there is no support for me when we reach M3, the authorities seem determined to aid the Chinese in capturing me," Nam Kah explained. "I say fight while we have the power to do so."

"Of course I will resist the Chinese, or any who would aid them for my wife. I know I can't speak for him, but I can't imagine our director of security taking part in such an unjust arrest. Jon is a good guy."

"Assuming Jon is still director when we get back," Happy pointed out.

"Things are less settled than you might think," Eddie said cautiously. "When I left, Jon was polling the security staff to see where their loyalties lie. If the Earthies push too hard and demand the sort of arrest they tried on ISSII. Well, Jon is not one to take illegal orders and try to hide behind them later to escape responsibility. If he and the other sworn officers split with Earth, how much easier the other residents, who don't have to weigh their solemn oath. He was concerned enough to be checking each shuttle flight to see if they might try to sneak an unprovoked paramilitary raid in a scheduled flight."

"And what," Happy asked, "Was Jon prepared to do, if he found such a team doing basically an invasion?"

"He didn't inform me and I wasn't around to see how his poll of the department went. But I'd point out he gave you a significant piece of department equipment to defend yourselves. That shows he will commit," Eddie said.

"So how about
you
? Do you want to try to keep your hands clean and see if you can distance yourself from how we exited IISSII? Or do you vote to do as much damage to them as we can, before going home?" Easy asked him.

"There's no way I'm coming out of this smelling sweet to the Norte Americanos. Even if I physically resisted you and came back duct taped to restrain me, it wouldn't matter. Everyone in this ship is marked. Might as well be hung for wolf as a lamb."

"Okay then, it's unanimous to attack the sats, that's the main thing we wanted to know. Lets pump it down and we will explain everybody's battle stations," Happy ordered. "We can talk - talk more later, if they don't shoot our little butts off."

With the coffin lock open they mounted the gun for Easy in the wider center section and Eddie would be prepared to shoot a missile out through the narrower opening on either side. April would have to keep the lock away from the enemy until quite close, then turn to let them fire from that side and fight the laser herself. She had a routine set for the ship to take a reading of their attitude on a single command and hold it, because they knew she could not work the laser and fly at the same time.

They had suit patch material laid out and the Drs. Singh were prepared to help anyone with a leak. Easy was very aware he was asking April to do more than her experience warranted. He even considered leaving the machine gun in the case and joining her to run the flight controls and laser as a team. But he was not sure what it would take to kill a military shuttle and he knew the machine gun would be effective up close, even if they had some technology to absorb the laser.

With everything prepared all they had to do was wait. And their plasma drive burn had lifted them so quickly to the higher orbit, it was a six hour wait before the Pretty as
Jade
came close enough they could detect its search radar. When they did so they gave everybody a chance to use the toilet, loaded the p-suits with water, medicines and snack bars in the helmet racks and fresh absorbent pads in case they were bottled up too long to hold it. Nobody had the equipment or desire for a micro catheter like the military used. They wanted to store as much air as possible in separate tanks, because they had no idea if they might lose some to combat damage, so they pumped down for almost two hours before cracking the lock open. They could crack the carbon dioxide as long as they had energy. But they needed enough volume to fill the cabin back to a breathable pressure and would prefer a normal mix, not oxygen rich.

The crew of the
Pretty as Jade
had apparently decided to overshoot and do a quick look see, then burn back to a rendezvous. They determined to let him pass and come back. Only the laser would have tracked and fired at so quickly a moving target and they would have had to fire up the radar and give away their position to use the data through the navigation computer. Even then it was not a real combat targeting program and Easy doubted if it would work quickly enough to intercept missiles if
Jade
launched them, or if they had automated jamming equipment.

The Chinese ship stopped their braking burn about fifty kilometers short of the radar reflectors and coasted by almost as far away from the decoy as the
Happy Lewis,
but on the opposite side. They had slowed way down to about 600 meters a second, but turned the ship as it went by so it was nose on to the decoy all the way past, presenting a minimum cross section to shoot at. Someone obviously took Easy's threat very seriously. Easy expressed his judgment to April that the fellow knew what he was doing and if they started shooting he did not expect him to sit around with his mouth hanging open, wondering what to do. They'd start shooting back pretty fast.

The
Jade
braked to a stop about a hundred kilometers past the decoy and sat there for awhile. "He's trying to make sense of it I bet. He's looking at high definition video and he doesn't see anything but maybe a few points of light from the reflectors," Easy speculated.

Then the boards showed a new radar at a much higher frequency, as the Jade moved in to approached the decoy.

"He's looking it over with a targeting radar. Hope he doesn't swing it around and search the entire volume around him. It might be good enough to see some of the gaps in our coverage. He might, or might not, show the decoy's reflectors as individual targets. Too bad we didn't make it more complicated to drive him nuts. We could have left a cloud of trash and junk and he might think we had a mishap and blew up for some reason."

From the back Eddie said, "In submarine warfare on Earth's oceans sometimes a submarine would blow oil and clothing and various kinds of junk which would float out a torpedo tube, to make the ships above trying to kill her think she had broken up. Same idea."

"Well if you know any more tricks we can apply successfully to our circumstances, feel free to offer them," Easy requested. "When they get back to the decoy there are a couple possibilities. They may sit and consult with home, or they may send somebody out in a suit to examine the reflectors for any clues they give about us. Or they may move off again because they're worried about an ambush. Anybody else have any other ideas about what they might do?"

Singh Nam-Kah spoke up. "They are Chinese military. They will
ask
what they should do. Initiative is rarely encouraged and often punished, even if it succeeds. Especially when they are able to talk to their mission command for direction. They won't move off if you have not fired on them, because of their great arrogance and because it would look cowardly, not thoughtfully cautious to their superiors."

"Thanks Ma'am. I appreciate you know these people. Keep telling me how they'd think. OK, if they stop and put a man out it will take him maybe twelve to fifteen minutes to suit up and jet over to look even superficially at the decoy. But if they just ask what to do and they have a real decisive guy running their operation, he may just tell them to high tail it out of here in just a minute or two. It will take us over nine minutes to burn in on him, flip and burn to a halt. So he could be well away by the time we get there if he runs."

"And maybe it would be OK?" April asked. "We just let him go home?"