Month: February 2021

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Narrative

Getting Pinged

All day long, Spruance Del Curtin kept thinking about what Dr. Doorne had said. Sprue was not entirely unfamiliar with growth curves, since they’d gone over them in stats, and they’d been touched upon in a biology class he’d taken a while back.

What he really wanted to know was the nature of the growth that was being measured. Especially with the wild rumors going around about the situation in Schirrasburg, Sprue wondered if Dr. Doorne had been discussing statistics on the spread of the diablovirus.

Except there was no good way to find out. He couldn’t ask because that would be admitting that he’d listened in on a conversation in which he had no part. And since he’d so little, and that quite vague, he had nothing to go on for making discreet inquiries around the settlement.

Face it, you’re out of options. Sprue didn’t like that conclusion. He was a Shep, and part of that geneset’s intense competitiveness was a ferocious determination.

But with nothing to go on, there was no real place to start. Unless he got a lucky break and happened upon something that pointed him in the right direction, he was out of the running.

Which meant he needed to get his mind on something more productive. He had more than enough work to do, between Dr. Doorne pushing him to do some of the most difficult statistical analysis with real data, as opposed to the standard teaching datasets the other students were getting, and his teaching responsibility becoming steadily heavier as his senior teacher pushed more and more onto him.

He was just starting on his latest lesson plan for that when his phone chimed incoming text. He pulled it up, discovered it was from Drew. Found anything yet?

Sprue considered how to answer that one. If it had been Ken Redmond asking, there would’ve been no question of admitting that he’d been listening in on Dr. Doorne’s telephone conversation. But Drew was a fellow Shep, and he’d take a more relaxed view of such things, especially when it might benefit him.

I’ve heard a few things around Science, but so far I haven’t been able to get any hard facts to back them with. But if you want some speculation, I’m thinking they’re looking at Schirrasburg as a test case in the limits of contagion in a closed population.

He paused for a moment before actually hitting the send button. It was just evasive enough about his sources that even if someone in authority were to go through his SMS logs, they wouldn’t be able to say that he’d been eavesdropping.

Drew must’ve needed to think about it too, because it was several minutes before he responded. Long enough for Sprue to decide it was time to dig back in on his work.

He was just getting back into that mindset when the text chime pulled him back out of his thoughts. Which indicates that they had something going around there, although not definite proof that it was the diablovirus.

But if it were just an ordinary bug, why would they be so hush-hush about it that we’ve got rumors all over the place? All they’d have to say is someone’s picked up a case of the flu and it’s spreading, so they’re taking some extra precautions to make sure it doesn’t spread in the middle of a crisis. Then everybody could stop worrying.

Once again Drew took a long time to reply, which left Sprue wondering if that last observation hadn’t been a wise move. Finally the writing message icon showed up, and then the text appeared. You underestimate the bureaucratic mind.

The whole knowledge is power thing?

More than just that. You never want to let information get out that makes you look bad if you can avoid it. That’s why so much embarrassing information gets classified as secret, even when there’s no national security reason.

And why people keep covering things up, never mind that it’s usually the coverup that gets them in trouble, not the actual thing they were covering up.

Exactly. Which is why I’m thinking that it was a diablovirus outbreak, and it was seriously bad.

I’d believe it. But I sure don’t know how to go about confirming it.

Keep thinking about it, but whatever you do, be careful about it.

Sprue promised he would, which seemed to satisfy Drew. Now to get some serious work done on that lesson plan. Maybe he’d get some ideas while his mind was off the problem.

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Paying the Bills

The launch of a new science fiction adventure series–by the New York Times-best selling author of the Safehold series and the Honor Harrington series

The Galactic Hegemony has been around a long time, and it likes stability–the kind of stability that member species like the aggressive, carnivorous Shongairi tend to disturb. So when the Hegemony Survey Force encountered a world whose so-called “sentients”–“humans,” they called themselves–were almost as bad as the Shongairi themselves, it seemed reasonable to use the Shongairi to neutralize them before they could become a second threat to galactic peace. And if the Shongairi took a few knocks in the process, all the better.

Now, Earth is conquered. The Shongairi have arrived in force, and humanity’s cities lie in radioactive ruins. In mere minutes, more than half the human race has died.

Master Sergeant Stephen Buchevsky, who thought he was being rotated home from his latest tour in Afghanistan, finds himself instead prowling the back country of the Balkans, dodging alien patrols and trying to organize scattered survivors without getting killed. And in the southeastern US, firearms instructor and former Marine Dave Dvorak finds himself at the center of a growing network of resistance–putting his extended family at lethal risk, but what else can you do?

On the face of it, Buchevsky’s and Dvorak’s chances look bleak, as do prospects for the rest of the surviving human race. But it may well be that Shongairi and the Hegemony alike have underestimated the inhabitants of that strange planet called Earth… in David Weber’s Out of the Dark.

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

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Narrative

Dirty Little Secrets

Brenda turned the USB stick over and over in her hand, trying to decide whether she wanted to go through with this. On one hand, Lou Corlin had put himself at significant risk to go poking around some of those places he was talking about. On the other, if his skills at checking and cleaning those files wasn’t as good as he thought they were, she could manage to corrupt her entire laptop, perhaps even any networks it might be connected with.

It would be so much simpler if she had a spare computer with no network connections at all. A computer she could take chances with, without risking all her data, or even other computers here in Shepardsport.

But she wasn’t in a position to have that kind of luxury. Things had been tight up here ever since the Expulsions, which meant there was no such thing as surplussed equipment. You kept things running until they wore out, and then you sent them back to IT to be used in repairing other computers.

On the other hand, Lou did know what he was doing, and he was meticulous about getting the job done right. And if he’d been prowling around the dark side of the ‘Net, he had taken a pretty serious risk on her behalf. To refuse to look at what he’d dug up would be to disrespect his effort.

However, it didn’t mean she needed to take stupid chances. Carefully sitting Lou’s USB stick where she wouldn’t lose track of it, she retrieved one of her own and made a backup of everything on her laptop.

Only when she knew that all her data was backed up and the backup USB stick safely back in her bag did she finally mount Lou’s USB stick on her desktop. As she began to look through the folders, all neatly organized, she realized just how far Lou had gone for her.

Someone, somewhere, had gotten into a bunch of Chicago Police Department databases and dumped it somewhere on the darknet. Some of this stuff was video straight from cop dash cams and body cams. There was no way in heck any law enforcement agency would ever allow it out in the wild uncut like this.

Not to mention the 911 audio files and transcripts. Some of them could easily have serious privacy issues, depending on exactly what was on them. However, she was pretty confident that she was looking at the facts behind the rumor Drew had heard about warlords in the sketchier parts of the south side of Chicago.

And that was just the first few folders she’d gone through. If she was right, at least some of it would relate to the situation over at Schirrasburg.

Which meant she now had the problem of figuring out how to get this material to Drew without raising questions for which there could be no acceptable answers. A direct handoff would be ideal — but could she figure out a way to pass a physical object to Drew, given the quarantine measures that separated pilots from their families even during so-called personal visits?

First she needed to contact him, and carefully drop the hints that she had some seriously hot information. Then they could work out the particulars.

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Narrative

Remembered Days

The Science Department conference room felt ridiculously enormous for just two men to meet. However, Ken Redmond appreciated the choice of venue. Not just the fact that it was more spacious than either his or Reggie’s office, but the fact that it was neutral ground, so it didn’t have the emotional weight of meeting in either of their offices.

On the whole Reggie was a pretty laid-back commanding officer, especially for a Shep. Ken had heard plenty of stories about Alan Shepard’s management style as Chief Astronaut, even if those days had been long before his time. But when you went up to Reggie’s office, even to deliver a report rather than to answer for some fault in your department, there was always a sense of unease, of being on the spot. And when he came to your office, you always felt like your entire department was under the microscope.

Of course the real reason for them meeting here was the sophisticated 3-D A/V equipment Science had here. Equipment he needed for making his presentation on the innovative technique that might be able to produce replacement low-temperature bearings for the various cryo-pumps the settlement used.

Sure, he could’ve used the computer and monitor on his desk, maybe even offered the boss a pair of spex, but it wasn’t quite the same as having the images floating there on the tabletop, so real you’d think you could reach out and touch them. And right now, when he was asking for the boss to OK a huge departure from normal procedure, one that would involve changes in normal flight-certification procedures, he wanted the most persuasive presentation he could manage. Because he was really, really asking the boss to stick his neck out here.

Reggie arrived just as Ken was finishing his final checks on the equipment, making sure everything would show without any glitches. “So what are we looking at that’s so important we need the holoprojector system up here?”

Ken explained about the bearings. “Ever since NASA terminated the contract with McHenery and switched to Salwell, they’ve been wearing out about three times as fast, and we’ve been having no end of trouble maintaining our supply of spares.”

“Salwell? Wasn’t that part of North American Aviation?”

“North American bought them out during the build-up to the Space Shuttle program, and it got spun off again after Boeing bought out North American.”

That got a nod from Reggie. “I remember that now. Probably because they had more of the corporate culture problems than the guys from Seattle wanted to beat out of a new acquisition.”

“North American always had corporate culture problems. It goes way back to Apollo, and I’ve got it on good authority that you could scare them straight for a while after a bad accident, but it never solved the root problem, so it was always a matter of time before they’d start getting lax about the technical stuff. I honestly don’t understand why NASA kept going back to them when you couldn’t rely on them.”

“Because NASA’s a government agency, and therefore beholden to the bidding process.” Reggie leaned back in his chair, looking so much like Alan Shepard that Ken could completely understand how Wally Schirra could take a double-take at encountering him. “So North American underbids everyone else, gets the contract, and then ends up going over budget because half their work’s substandard. But the bean-counters only look at the up-front numbers, so NASA’s pretty much stuck. Get a bad enough accident and you might be able to shake things loose for a while, but then bureaucratic systems reassert themselves.”

A memory came back to Ken. He’d gone over to his ur-brother’s place to return some equipment, and was surprised to discover that Admiral Chaffee had come down to visit with his old boss. It would’ve had to have been some time in ’97, because President Dole had already nominated him as NASA Administrator but it hadn’t been officially confirmed by the Senate. However, he was already digging into the moonbase disaster, because he had brought a briefcase of papers with him and had them scattered about the table for Gus to examine.

Ken still remembered the admiral holding a sheaf of papers in one hand and whacking at them with the other as he made a point about unreliable contractors and nothing ever changing. It had been an awkward moment for a much younger man to have stumbled into such serious business — and Ken had not wanted to say or do anything that would have implied a criticism of Betty Grissom for sending him back here. So he’d stood there, making himself one with the wall as best he could, and got a ringside seat on the sorry story of the failures behind the disaster.

But was it really his story to tell here and now? He still remembered cringing at that horrible tell-all biography that had come out right after the admiral’s death.

No, telling that story added nothing to what he had to say. And they really needed to concentrate on his presentation now. Best to slide the conversation that way so he could lower the light level in here and get those holoprojectors running.

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Paying the Bills

What if V-E Day didn’t end World War II in Europe? What if, instead, the Allies had to face a potent, even fanatical, postwar Nazi resistance? Such a movement, based in the fabled Alpine Redoubt, was in fact a real threat, ultimately neutralized by Germany’s flagging resources and squabbling officials. But had SS Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, the notorious Man with the Iron Heart, not been assassinated in 1942, fate might have taken a different turn. We might likely have seen a German guerrilla war launched against the conquerors, presaging by more than half a century the protracted conflict with an unrelenting enemy that now engulfs the United States and its allies in Iraq. How might today’s clash of troops versus terrorists have played out in 1945?

In this imagined world, Nazi forces resort to unconventional warfare, using the quick and dirty tactics of terrorism–booby traps, time bombs, mortar and rocket strikes in the night, assassinations, even kamikaze-style suicide attacks–to overturn what seemed to be a decisive Allied victory. In November 1945, a truck bomb blows up the Nuremberg Palace of Justice, where high-ranking Nazi officials are about to stand trial for war crimes. None of the accused are there when the bomb goes off, but their judges, all of them present and accounted for, are annihilated. Worse acts of terrorism follow all over Europe.

Suddenly the Allies–especially the United States–must battle an invisible enemy and sacrifice countless lives in a long, seemingly pointless, unwinnable conflict. On the home front, patriotism corrodes, political fortunes are made and lost in the face of an antiwar backlash, and a once-proud country wonders how the righteous fight for freedom overseas has collapsed into a hopeless quagmire. At once a novel of thrilling military suspense, intriguing alternate history, and profound insight into contemporary affairs, The Man with the Iron Heart is a tour de force by a storyteller of exceptional imaginative power.

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Narrative

An Awkward Discussion

Although Lou Corlin didn’t really feel comfortable about what he was doing, he felt a level of obligation toward Brenda Redmond which wouldn’t let him give up after the easy routes were exhausted. All the same, the USB stick in his pocket had a weight far beyond its mass.

He wasn’t sure if the walk to Brenda’s apartment would’ve been easier or harder if the corridors had been busy. On one hand, being alone made it easier to dwell on his uneasiness. On the other, he didn’t have to worry about his discomfort being so obvious to everyone else that they wondered what he was up to.

When he got through the airlock into Brenda’s module, she was sitting by the far wall, supervising her children while doing something on a laptop. Lou paused, taking the measure of the situation.

Finally Brenda looked up, met his gaze. Yes, she could spare the time to speak to him.

Why did he feel the need to tiptoe across the module lounge? By conscious will he forced himself to walk normally, the light, bouncy stride of someone accustomed to lunar gravity and comfortable with it.

Brenda kept her voice low. “This is a surprise.”

“Sorry, but some of this stuff is rather sensitive. It’s not exactly the sort of thing you want to talk about in a phone call or a text.”

Yes, Brenda understood. “Give me a minute to get the kids to bed.”

Lou took a seat while Brenda led her children back to their apartment. He’d been here long enough to remember when Brenda was very much the teenage daughter of the Chief Engineer, still not very sure about the idea of being whisked away from her high-school friends in Houston for life up here on the High Frontier.

But then we’ve all done a lot of fast growing up these past few years. If things had gone normally, we’d just be starting to assume adult roles by now. And even when you’re taking an engineering degree and doing ROTC, college isn’t quite the same as actually being out in the working world.

And then Brenda was back, taking a seat close enough they could keep their voices low enough that the ventilation fans would mask their voices, but not so close that anyone running the video tapes would think they were cooking up a fling — and in a public area, anyone with suitable authority could access them. “So what is it?”

“You know what I mean when I talk about darkboards?”

Definite recognition in her expression, mixed with a little alarm. “Aren’t they dangerous?”

“They can be, if you’re not careful. Some of them are a good way to pick up a nasty virus on your computer. But they can also be a good place to find information the government doesn’t want people knowing. And IT does have the tools to sequester data while you’re making sure that it’s clean.”

He was glad he’d taken the opportunity to get the USB stick out of his pocket while he was waiting. There was a trick to pulling out something innocuous at the same time, then palming what you didn’t want seen. Now he just had to pass it to Brenda without being obvious.

She must’ve had classmates who passed notes in class, because she handled it with the deftness of an expert. Lou had never pegged her as someone who’d get into that sort of thing. Given her dour father, he would’ve expected her to be the sort of straight-arrow everyone always thought his geneset was.

Now that the hand-off was done, he couldn’t very well take off right away. Better to carry on a little small talk, keeping their voices down as if it were just out of consideration for the hour. Once they’d made this meeting completely unremarkable, he could head off to his own quarters for the night.

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When the World Starts Running Down

With supply lines disrupted by the pandemic, it was inevitable that the lunar settlements would eventually run out of supplies of something that was difficult or impossible to fabricate locally. Even after nearly two decades of building in-situ resource utilization programs, there were still a number of vital items for which they remained dependent upon supplies from Earth. Generally, these were items that required specialized technologies to produce, or which were not used in sufficient numbers to justify development of lunar manufacturing capabilities.

The normal procedure was to maintain a stockpile of spares, particularly of items for vital equipment, that was considered sufficient for typical usage patterns. As spares were used, they would be replaced by shipments from Earth, but their presence in the settlements would provide a buffer for emergencies.

However, this system presupposed that resupply from Earth could be undertaken well before the spares in stock would be used. That is, it could cover a small disruption in spacelift, such as bad weather at the launch site that might prevent a cargo spacecraft from being launched until the next launch window.

The diablovirus pandemic was a disruption at an unprecedented level. Although launches never were completely suspended, supply lines from the manufacturers to the launch complexes were disrupted at multiple levels. Many companies shut down assembly lines or even entire factories, whether their industries were viewed as “non-essential” by government bean-counters or diablovirus-related absenteeism reached such levels as they simply could not maintain the staffing necessary to do the work.

Even if the items in question were being produced, there was still the problem of getting them from factory to launch site. With so many truckers out from the diablovirus, transportation companies were prioritizing food, medicine and other obvious essentials for cargo space in their vehicles, which meant such items as low-temperature bearings for cryo-pumps or high-temperature rocket engine parts often got left at the end of the line.

There were several cases in which small but critical items were picked up by NASA personnel at the factory and then driven by personal car to Kennedy Space Center, sometimes arriving only hours before the launch window closed and being carried aboard the spacecraft by an astronaut rather than loaded as cargo.

As the pandemic proceeded, even these makeshift methods began to break down. As a result, it became necessary for the various settlements to develop their own ability to make these items, even if only in small quantities and with far less efficient methods than the normal techniques. Given that the alternative was apt to be the slow degradation of vital technologies to the point their settlements became unable to sustain life, they could no longer afford to let the perfect become the enemy of the good enough.

Shepardsport, which had been innovating in stretching equipment far beyond its intended use lifetime, was the first to take these measures….

—- S. K. Wyszynski, “Improvisation and Survival on the High Frontier,” Building for Resilience. Grissom City: St. Selene Digital Press, 2074.

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Narrative

The First Cracks

It was a good thing Ken Redmond was used to being able to concentrate in noisy environments, because his office here in Engineering was anything but quiet. Not surprising when it had been constructed of the lunar equivalent of wallboard, fastened to a frame of lunar aluminum.

In a city where pressurized volume was at a premium, noisy machinery was never far away. Not so close as to require hearing protection, but still an ever-changing background din, just enough to draw one’s attention, to disrupt one’s focus on the task at hand. And given that he was looking over specs for a new installation, he needed his attention on his work.

Which was why he did not appreciate having his phone pick that moment to start ringing. Glowering, he grabbed it and growled, “Engineering, Redmond speaking.”

“This is Carter Branning down at Flight Ops. One of my crews just pulled a cryo-pump on one of the landers, and we’ve got a major problem. You know those low-temperature bearings we’ve been having no end of trouble with? They’re going out on this one too, and NASA’s had our spares backordered since before this mess started.”

A chill brought gooseflesh to Ken’s skin, even in the ever-present heat of Engineering. Without working cryo-pumps to move cryogenic fuels and oxidizers, spacecraft couldn’t fly. Although it would be possible to pull a working cryo-pump from a lander with a different problem, you couldn’t do it indefinitely. Eventually you had to either have a new supply of spares or you were sidelining so many that your fleet was understrength.

“Have you asked over at Slayton Field or Coopersvile whether they have any extras?”

“First thing I tried, and they’re under minimum to be able to lend us any. Even called Edo Settlement, since JAXA uses a lot of our equipment, but that’s one item they didn’t adopt. Everyone knows those things are garbage, and it was a political decision to switch away from McHenery Aerospace to the bozos who made them.”

Ken had plenty of recriminations of his own, but they didn’t get equipment repaired. “I’ll talk to Zack, see if he knows of anything compatible we’re using for other applications. Otherwise, we’re going to have to fabricate something, and those low-temperature applications are the devil.”

“Tell me about it. We’ve got a complete machine shop down here at Flight Ops, but even it doesn’t have the equipment to work on low-temperature fittings for cryo-pumps. Things start acting weird when you’re talking single digits in Kelvin.”

Ken had too much to do right now to waste time grousing about the situation. “I’ll let you know as soon as I know what we’re going to be looking at.”

Now to get Zack on the horn and get that kid to work on the problem. Then Ken could finally get back to what he was supposed to be doing, that actually needed his authority.

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Paying the Bills

New York Times bestselling author Harry Turtledove’s thought-provoking forays into the past have produced such intriguing “what-if” novels as Ruled Britannia, Days of Infamy, and Opening Atlantis. Now “the maven of alternate history” (The San Diego Union-Tribune) envisions the election of a United States President whose political power will redefine what the nation is—and what it means to be American….
 
President Herbert Hoover has failed America. The Great Depression that rose from the ashes of the 1929 stock market crash still casts its dark shadow over the country. Despairing and desperate, the American people hope one of the potential Democratic candidates—New York governor Franklin D. Roosevelt and California congressman Joe Steele—can get the nation on the road to recovery.
 
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Narrative

Hints

Spruance Del Curtin had not intended to spy on Dr. Doorne’s communications. In fact, he was planning to just slip in and get some extra work done, and maybe get ahead of the game for a change.

But this batch of data was more boring than usual, and the longer he worked at it, the more his mind began to wander. Nearby voices became more interesting than the rows and columns on the screen in front of him.

Something about sigmoid functions and limits to growth. Dr. Doorne had talked about sigmoid functions in class a couple of sessions ago, and had used several examples, including one from biology, of a new species colonizing a new habitat its population and initially showing an exponential growth curve before hitting the limits of the environment and leveling off to a stable population.

Except that didn’t sound like what she was talking about now. For that matter, it didn’t exactly sound like she was talking to one of her students. No, that sounded more like she was talking to someone closer to her own level.

Even as he wondered just what she was talking about, he realized he was listening in on a conversation in which he had no part. A major breach of courtesy, although as long as he wasn’t obvious about it, calling attention to it would be an equally grave matter.

Which meant that if he wanted to find out what she was talking about, he would have to be extremely discreet about it. Which was not easy when he had only caught part of her conversation, and didn’t have a whole lot of context to work with.

In the meantime, he’d better get his mind back on the work that he was supposed to be doing. The last thing he needed right now was for her to walk in and find him clearly not paying attention to his work.