Month: September 2020

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Paying the Bills

The New York Times bestselling author and “maven of alternate history” (San Diego Union-Tribune) presents a near- future thriller.

A supervolcanic eruption in Yellowstone Park sends lava and mud flowing toward populated areas, and clouds of ash drifting across the country. The fallout destroys crops and livestock, clogs machinery, and makes cities uninhabitable. Those who survive find themselves caught in an apocalyptic catastrophe in which humanity has no choice but to rise from the ashes and recreate the world…

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Narrative

Nourishment for Body and Soul

Jenn Redmond had spent most of the morning going through inventories in preparation for her touch-base meeting with Alice Murchison. At least now she knew all the things she needed to ask the head of Agriculture, but she had very mixed feelings.

This time she was going down to Alice’s office for the meeting, which made sense. They both needed to actually see what the other was doing.

However, when she arrived, she discovered that Alice was already in a meeting with someone else. From the sound of it, something had gone seriously wrong with the drip irrigation system in one of the greenhouses, and they were having to hand-water some five hundred square meters worth of tiered vegetable plantings. Just to make it complicated, it would be in one of the high-carbon-dioxide intensive vegetable production greenhouses, which restricted who they could press into service. No one without oxygen-delivery certification could wear the self-contained breathing apparatus that was necessary to work in that atmosphere, which meant she was having to pay highly-skilled technical personnel to haul buckets of water.

But if those plants go into permanent wilt and die, people are going to be going hungry. Even as that thought came to her, Jenn recalled her experience in victory gardening back during the Energy Wars. In fact, depending on exactly what they are, even if they do come back, the yields are going to take enough of a hit that meals could get a lot smaller.

Apparently whoever was talking with Alice was on the technical side of things, because he said he’d take a look at it just as soon as he could retrieve his breathing rig from Engineering. Alice thanked him, and then the door slid open and a tall, muscular young man stepped out.

“Hello, Miz Jennifer.” Juss Forsythe was a clone of Ed White, and Ken’s all-around troubleshooter and fix-it man. “I hope I didn’t cause you any trouble.”

“No, not at all.” The words came out awkwardly, in a rush. “You obviously are dealing with a critical matter, and a routine meeting can wait.”

“Thanks. I’d better be going now.” With that, Juss hurried away to complete his errand.

At that point Alice gestured for her to come in and take a seat. “Sorry to keep you waiting, but we have a problem.”

As Alice explained the problem, Jenn listened attentively, although she was already aware of the situation. “Do you think you can save those plantings?”

“We hope so. That’s why we’ve been working so hard to hand-water them while Juss works on the irrigation system. That kid’s sharp, and it really helps that he’s finally old enough to get his oxygen-delivery certification so he can work in those greenhouses.”

“That’s good to hear. Right now, we have enough food that we can keep everyone fed a diet that meets NASA nutritional standards for the next three months. It’s going to be monotonous and not necessarily very filling, but nobody’s going to starve..”

“Which is good to hear. There are some things I can do to help make things better, but there are some foods that simply require too narrow of growing conditions for us to be able to produce them in a lunar greenhouse farm, or at least produce them in the quantities we need to feed the entire community.”

Jenn had a fairly good idea of what those were. She’d talked with her husband about whether the chemistry people down at Engineering might be able to synthesize some of the flavors of certain spices that had to be brought up from Earth. But even those would take time to work out, particularly if there wasn’t that much to work on.

We may just have to focus on keeping everyone fed, even if it isn’t the tastiest food.

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Narrative

The Unwinding

The station was oddly quiet today. Maybe it was the absence of Spruance Del Curtin, who’d gotten pulled off to some other duty and had Quinn Merton taking over his shift for the day.

But Autumn never had any trouble with him. It probably helped that she was the daughter of a Shep herself, and had inherited her father’s long face and lanky build. All the Sheps had taken one look at her and known that she was Off Limits for their antics.

Still, she was noticing his absence far too much as she sat at her desk, trying to work her way through the latest reports from Earth. At least AP and Reuters were still reporting, although she had her doubts about the reliability of some of the stringers. Especially after she’d talked with Dr. Thuc and some of the people up at Gagarinsk, she was very cautious about any reports about analysis or sequencing of the genome of the diablovirus, especially the ones suggesting it might have been artificially manipulated. Without evidence that the person doing the reporting had a strong background in the biological sciences, there was no telling how well they understood what their sources were telling them, or how much they might be letting wishful thinking or fear color their understanding.

Of more concern were the local reports she could still pick up — and the fact that a number of local radio and TV stations had stopped updating their websites altogether. Just how badly were things unraveling down there? Not just in the areas where technological civilization had been primarily an elite phenomenon and people outside the big showplace cities continued to live as their ancestors had from time out of mind, but in places she considered thoroughly modern.

Heck, there were several small-town radio stations in Minnesota that hadn’t updated their websites in over a week. Call signs she recognized from late-night twirling of the radio dial,. that she’d followed for old times’ sake. Some of them even had people she knew personally from broadcast journalism classes at U-Minn.

Would it do any good to try to raise them by e-mail? Most of the station websites did include contact information, at least for their news staff if not for the on-air personalities.

At least then you might be able to get a better sense of just what’s happening on the ground, without the filter of what appearances officialdom wants presented to the rest of the Solar System.

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Narrative

The Children’s Hour

The classroom was a clamor of children’s voices, fairly bouncing off every surface. Once again Spruance Del Curtin wondered how he’d managed to get roped into this particular duty.

He knew all too well why — the kids were supposed to be going to the observatory for a basic science class. And kids this young were going to need more than just one or even two adults to keep them in good order on the trip up and back. So as Dr. Doorne’s special protege, he’d gotten roped into the task — and he sure couldn’t very well refuse, not when he really needed to keep on her good side.

However, the observatory was a geodesic dome of moonglass — one of the few surface features of the settlement to be part of its pressurized volume. With the Sun in such an unsettled state, even the solar filters were rather flimsy protection from radiation, especially for young children who were still growing.

So they were going to have a planetarium lesson instead, in the biggest room the science department had. Except for one big problem — the projector was still somewhere in the Astronomy Department’s storage rooms, thanks to a miscommunication, probably related to the change of plans.

It would’ve been so much easier if the teacher had just sent him up to the departmental offices to retrieve it. He actually knew his way around the Astronomy Department, unlike Ms. Cartwright, who just had some general science background and had been assigned the class because she was good with kids.

So here he was, stuck minding a bunch of little kids who were bored out of their minds. Worse, he’d had to arrange for one of the other guys to cover his air shift, and he was really missing it right now.

Especially considering that he was having to do this job with Rand Littleton. That kid was such an apple-polisher, and everyone favored him because he was a survivor of the ordeal in the downed lander. Never mind that it had been how many years now since the destruction of the old Luna Station, those kids always got cut slack on everything.

And Rand had been “one of the little kids” back then. The biggest reason he’d gotten so much responsibility was that one of the geologists had made him her protege.

And I don’t dare complain too much about it because her husband’s one of my clone-brothers. Sprue still remembered how Doyle had dressed him down. No, he had no desire for a repetition, and just because the pilots were all quarantined down at Flight Ops for now didn’t mean they would be forever.

And we Sheps have long memories.

At least keeping the kids corralled didn’t leave much time for anything else, so he didn’t have to make conversation with Rand. And quite honestly, Rand was a whole lot better with kids than he was. Rand always had that knack for finding ways to amuse little kids.

And here came Ms. Cartwright, projector in hand. At least she had a good idea that Sprue would know how to set it up, so he didn’t have to sit there trying to keep the kids quiet while she fumbled her way through the process.

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Document

The Wind from the Sun

The solar wind is perhaps one of the most poorly understood astronomical phenomena, at least in the general populace. This stream of charged particles from the solar corona spreads out throughout the Solar System, and is believed to extend well beyond the Kuiper Belt. This volume of space is known as the heliosphere.

The point at which the solar wind meets the interstellar medium is known as the heliopause, and is believed to be a region of great turbulence. Because the Sun follows an orbit around the central black hole of the Milky Way galaxy, the heliosphere is not a true sphere, but rather a shape more like a comet. The region of the heliosphere in the direction of the Sun’s orbit is compressed by its collision with the interstellar medium, while the trailing parts of the heliosphere extend like a wake.

Popular misconceptions about the solar wind are heavily influenced by early science fiction, especially space operas in which space is treated like an ocean. Although the solar wind is an important contributor to space weather, it does not drive solar storms such as flares or coronal mass ejections the way atmospheric winds drive hurricanes or mesocyclones on Earth.

—- Rand Littleton, response to essay question on solar wind, Introduction to Astrodynamics.

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Narrative

Beyond the Horizon

Every time Drew closed his eyes, he kept seeing the lunar horizon stretching out before him. Maybe it was just because he didn’t feel so hemmed in when he was flying.

Even back at Slayton Field, the restrictions were getting tighter as the close calls kept accumulating. At first they just hadn’t been allowed to go into the main part of Grissom City, but they were allowed to mix freely with the support staff. Now they were under orders to remain in their quarters when they weren’t actively working on something that took them to a particular place.

And it’s interesting how many people suddenly get a whole lot more interested in simulator time. Half the pilots wouldn’t put in any more than the essential time, and now we’re all practically fighting for our turns on those machines.

Here, it would be much harder to argue for simulator time, or pretty much anything that would get him out of this tiny BOQ cubicle. Sure, they’d set up a place for visitations, but the kids had been more frustrated than happy at seeing Daddy through a thick plate of moonglass, so he and Brenda had agreed that it would be just as well to just visit via FaceTime on their tablets, which they could do no matter where he was.

Which meant there was nothing to do but wait until Brenda called. And in the meantime, he had documentation he really needed to be looking over. Even amidst a pandemic and a solar storm watch, he needed to keep up with his secondary astronaut specialty.

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Narrative

So Close and Yet So Far Away

Drew’s back in town. Brenda wished she could really feel excited about it the way she ought to.

But it couldn’t change the fact that he couldn’t really come home, not as long as there was any question of pilots catching the diablovirus in one spaceport and then bringing it home to spread through the close quarters of a lunar settlement. Even if she took the kids down to Flight Operations to see their daddy, the closest they were going to come was seeing him through a thick moonglass window and talk over a glorified speakerphone. They could just as well FaceTime on her tablet and spare themselves the time and effort of going down to Innsmouth Sector.

Or at least that had been the plan. Instead, Brenda had gotten a call that there had been some problems with some of the air handlers up in Miskatonic Sector, and the crew needed someone slim and flexible to get into the plenum leading to them.

She couldn’t very well disappoint her dad, so she’d left the kids with a friend while she dealt with the latest emergency. At least the last two CME’s have shot off in the direction of Jupiter, so we’ve had a reprieve there, even if we are still under the solar storm watch.

Still, the work was pretty routine, and left her far too much time for thought. Like recollections of when she and Drew had first met, in those wild and crazy days right after the destruction of Luna Station. He’d been such a hero, trekking overland from a downed lander to get help for his commander, who’d been injured in the damage that had put them down there.

Her folks had been a little concerned about her getting involved with someone who was several years older. However, they hadn’t quite gone to the point of forbidding her any contact with Drew, just pointed out that she had three more months until her eighteenth birthday, and needed to remember that.

And then he managed to get a lander down on manual after the flight computer got corrupted in the cyber-attack, and everyone’s attitudes changed.

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Paying the Bills

Global war devastated the environment, a zombie-like plague wiped out much of humanity, and civilization as we once understood it came to a standstill. But that was a thousand years ago, and the world is now a very different place.

Conflict between city states is constant, superstition is rife, and machine relics, mutant creatures and resurrected prehistoric beasts trouble the land. Watching over all are the silent Dreaming Cities. Homes of the angels, bastion outposts of heaven on Earth. Or so the church claims. Very few go in, and nobody ever comes out.

Until now…

“Haley serves up equal helpings of horror, fantasy adventure, and SF in this stark, intriguing story of a ruined Earth where the remaining humans are determined to survive.” – Publishers Weekly

“Entertaining and exciting… If grim-dark is your thing, then this is a great read for you.” – Bull-Spec

At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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Narrative

Peering into the Mists of Time

Spruance Del Curtin didn’t usually go down to IT to talk with Lou Corlin. But after Dr. Doorne had given him a totally new group of data sets, he wanted to talk to Lou where they’d have ready access to the heavy iron.

Especially if this is part of something that IT’s processing.

Lou was back in one of the big server rooms, busy at a terminal of some sort. He looked up as soon as Sprue walked in.

Lou’s dark eyebrows drew down in a scowl. “Who sent you back here? This area is supposed to be authorized personnel only.”

Sprue jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the corridor. “The girl out front said you were back here. She didn’t say anything about having to wait while she got you.” He pointedly didn’t add that he’d spent several minutes flattering her before asking Lou’s whereabouts, buttering her up so she’d be more likely to let him through.

“Dang, Julie’s brand new down here. You do realize you may have just gotten her in a whole lot of trouble, if Steffi comes around and finds you back here with me. These are supposed to be secure servers that handle sensitive information. They don’t even have direct Internet connections. If we have random people coming and going, we don’t have secure servers any more because someone could just help themselves to the data.”

“Crap. I didn’t realize it was that big a deal. I just wanted to ask you about some data Dr. Doorne was having me work on. The stuff she had been having me go through is pretty clearly demographic, and I think it has something to do with the pandemic. But this stuff is completely different. I mean, the fundamental structure of the data is different.” Sprue described some of the variables that he’d been working with.

“That sounds like astronomical data. The drives that came in from Mars on the Soryu must’ve finally cleared quarantine and been cleared–“

“Data from Mars? What would she be doing with that? I mean, she’s a radio astronomer, not a planetary geologist.”

“Hasn’t she told you anything about her work? She’s one of the principal researchers in a big study that’s using FSRA and the new radio array on Mars as a truly gigantic baseline radio telescope. It’s a really complicated thing that has to adjust for general and special relativity to pull all the data together, so her background in signals analysis is absolutely critical. They’re hoping to be able to detect objects further away than ever before, and thanks to the speed of light, that means further into the past. If they’re right, they may be able to sort the last echoes of the first few mintues after the Big Bang from the cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang itself, and determine if the universe is actually part of a multiverse of universes that interact at the quantum level.”

“Wow. That sounds pretty cool.”

“Which is why you’d better get out of here, now, if you don’t want to get kicked off all her projects with a big fat black mark on your permanent record. Come over to our module lounge after supper tonight and I’ll tell you more.”

Although Sprue didn’t like being dismissed, especially not by a clone of a member of the third astronaut selection group, he could tell that persisting would only risk attracting attention. So he took his leave as gracefully as he could manage, hoping it wasn’t too obvious just how intense a curiosity was burning inside his mind right now.

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Narrative

Ripples

At the receptionist’s desk, Cindy Margrave tried not to pay too much attention as Autumn Belfontaine walked Colonel Hearne to the door. It was a gesture of courtesy — he certainly knew how to get back out of the station offices by himself. But honor was due to the commander of the last flight of the Falcon, who’d kept the crippled orbiter’s crew alive until the Incomparable Nekrasov could rescue them with Baikal.

Right now they were just making small talk, pleasantries that offered no clue about why the chief of Flight Operations should need to talk to the station’s news director. Cindy caught something about University of Minnesota, from which both of them had graduated, albeit decades apart. Probably just a reminiscence of some feature of the campus that loomed large in both their memories.

It’s probably just as well he didn’t come up here during Spruance Del Curtain’s shift. Sprue’s the sort of guy who sees something like this as a challenge to get around social conventions to find out what’s gong on.

And he’d gotten in trouble over those antics more than once. It probably didn’t help that he tended to view himself as the smartest guy in the room, and figure he could find a way around restrictions. It was an attitude that had probably put the kibosh on any chance of his ever being selected for pilot training, and it was a wonder he hadn’t been kicked off the station staff.

Although he had been more subdued lately, ever since he started doing that project for Dr. Doorne. Which reminded Cindy that she had a project of her own to finish. The sales director wanted her to do a research project for him, and she still had a lot of work to do. With less than an hour left on her shift, she needed to buckle down and get focused.