Day: March 25, 2020

Categories
Narrative

A Little Less Conversation

Listening to Shepardsport Pirate Radio in your office could be tricky here in the Roosa Barracks, since Grissom City was still trying to stay cozy with the Administration. But Peter Caudell had enough family over there on Farside that he liked to keep it on, even if he had to keep the volume low or listen on headphones. Which was a lot easier these days than it had been back in the days before Bluetooth.

And right now he was just as glad he’d picked the completely private option, because something seriously strange was going on over there. For starters, they were playing way too much Elvis. It would’ve been one thing if this were a Sunday morning, because that was Payton Shaw’s program, the Church of the Blessed Elvis. Two hours of nothing but the Man from Memphis.

But today was a rather ordinary Tuesday. Everything he could see was showing ordinary levels of traffic in cislunar space, and the Sun was behaving itself quite nicely. None of the messy coronal mass ejections that seemed to be characteristic of a solar minimum and could wreck havoc with space activities.

So why did so many songs by Elvis Presley keep showing up on their playlist? Even in the Classic Rock program in the afternoon, Spruance Del Curtin tended to favor acts from the 70s and 80s, but today he’d played half a dozen Elvis songs.

And now that the disco program was on, Spencer Dawes was playing that cover of “A Little Less Conversation.” What was that band’s name? Something-or-other XL, Peter had never paid much attention because disco wasn’t his kind of music. Was it worth the risk to go online to the Shepardsport Pirate Radio website and check their official playlist?

Still, it bothered him just enough to be a persistent itch at the back of his mind. Maybe he ought to make a few discreet inquiries to his clone-brothers over there, see if any of them had heard anything. Too bad none of them had landed a position on the station staff, which was a shame when one considered Scott Carpenter’s fondness for music.

Worst case, there was always Payton Shaw. Sure, he was a Cooper, but the clones of the Mercury Seven did stick together.

Categories
Narrative

A Meeting of Import

Autumn Belfontaine didn’t know when she’d gotten into the habit of counting the airlocks as she went from one part of Shepardsport to another. However, it had become a useful way of marking her own progress on any journey of significant distance. Go from one sector to another and you went through an airlock. Go between modules within a sector and you went through more airlocks.

From the radio station offices to the commandant’s office was eight airlocks. Since there was no need to wait for pressure to equalize, it didn’t take all that long to go through them, but there’d been trouble with people overriding the safety interlocks to get through faster, never mind it defeated the purpose of having the settlement modularized.

She arrived to find Captain Waite already in conference with Dr. Thuc, Shepardsport’s Chief Flight Surgeon. From the sound of it, telling the kids to keep a lid on it had been the right thing to do.

As a civilian, Autumn didn’t have to formally report to the commandant upon arrival as pilots did. All the same, the various courtesies helped to smooth the difficulties of life in such close quarters.

Reggie gestured for her to take the other seat. “We’ve got a problem on our hands.” He turned to Dr. Thuc. “Barbie?”

“I’ve just received alerts from both Jerusalem and Tokyo about an emergent disease in multiple places in Central and South Central Asia. I’ve queried Star City, and they’re telling me they’re waiting for a report from Academician Voronsky before making any definite announcement.”

A sudden chill gripped Autumn. Nikolai Voronsky was the Russian Empire’s foremost expert in genetic engineering, having learned from his adoptive father, the notorious Vladilen Voronsky. If Star City was getting him involved…

Autumn forced her mind to stay focused, professional, remember what she’d learned about contagious diseases from reporting on that nasty flu during her first full-time job. “What kind of figures are we looking at?”

“Right now information’s pretty spotty. Hardly surprising when a lot of those areas are still held by die-hard fanatics, and the ones that aren’t have governments notorious for corruption and misinformation. But even in the absence of hard data, the anecdotal reports are concerning, in particular the ones of whole villages empty, the goats and chickens wandering freely.”

“That’s not good.” Autumn tried to remember any mention of such things on the news wires. “Why haven’t we heard anything about this until now?”

“Actually, there has been a fair amount of discussion over the past few weeks, if you’ve been following the medical blogs.” Dr. Thuc’s expression darkened. “That’s where I got the stories about abandoned mountain villages. Why none of the official sources have been mentioning these things is hard to say. The local governments may well be covering it up rather than look weak. It may not be considered newsworthy elsewhere, or there may have been a decision to keep quiet rather than risk panic.”

“Understood.” Autumn recalled a journalism ethics class. “The ’76 Swine Flu outbreak was before my time, but we still study the effects of careless reporting on the reaction to it.”

She paused, considering not just the information she’d been given, but the spaces between. “If this is going to be something serious, why isn’t the head of Safety and Security here?”

Reggie jumped in to answer that. “Right now she’s dealing with a problem down in the port facility. As soon as that’s dealt with, we’ll be briefing her. But right now, we need to work out a plan for how we’re going to release information on this situation, so you can lay it out to the rest of the station personnel.”

Autumn fought down an urge to bristle. No, there was no criticism of the professionalism of the DJ’s, just the need to make sure they had a coordinated approach. “Completely understood. The worst thing we can have is contradictory information coming out of different sources. Once people start wondering who’s lying, they lose trust in all sources.”