Glad for the privacy of his apartment, Rick Sutton read both e-mails through a second time. Hunter Cartaret and Quinn Merton were both pretty level-headed guys, not surprising given their geneset. And both messages gave the appearance of having been composed with great care to convey the utmost of calm and rationality.
Yet a little reading between the lines made it pretty clear that both of his young clone-brothers wanted to know whether he’d heard anything they didn’t know already. Not surprising from Hunter, but Quinn did the Full Moon Barn Dance at Shepardsport Pirate Radio, so he should have access to everything that was going through the newsroom.
Unless there’s something going on that the news department isn’t telling the DJ’s.
Most of the on-air personalities were quite young — back on Earth they would still be in college, and a couple still in high school. But Autumn Belfontaine was a professional reporter who’d worked at an actual commercial radio station before getting sent up here as an AP stringer to cover the fiftieth anniversary celebrations. Especially given that she’d been trying to hide how badly she’d been shaken by that business about the cruise ship, it was quite possible that she was getting more information but it was embargoed for one reason or another, and she wasn’t confident the kids could keep a lid on it.
Maybe he should’ve been paying more attention to the scuttlebutt around the water coolers in Port Operations. Coopersville’s spaceport might not be a big traffic hub like Slayton Field, but it got a fair number of flights in and out every day. And while it might not be like the wild and wooly days of Mercury and Gemini, a lot of the pilot-astronauts still liked a good game of one-upmanship. And knowing something the other guys didn’t was always a way to score big points.
On the other hand, if there were something big going on, discussing it on NASA bandwidth could be risky. Not to mention that as a commissioned officer of the US Air Force, he was under the UCMJ. Discussing something that was supposed to be secret over an insecure e-mail network could get him into more trouble than he wanted to think about, even if he hadn’t gotten the information via secure communications.
Better to counsel caution — ears open and mouths shut. He and Doyle would be flying up there in a few days, so he could arrange to talk face-to-face with the kids. Keep their voices low and some music on, and there shouldn’t be any reason to worry about awkward recordings like the one crew on the first Skylab station.