Chandler Armitage had gotten reasonably used to the BOQ at the Roosa Barracks, to the point where he hardly needed to think about most of the things he needed to do for an overnight stay. His nutritional profile and food preferences were in the kitchen database, so there was little chance of a mixup resulting in the deliverybot presenting him with something inadequate or completely unacceptable. The WiFi password was in the keychains of all his devices, so logging on was a single click and he could catch up on his studies or surf the Web in search of entertainment. Quite honestly, it wasn’t all that much difference from being back home in Shepardsport, now that the pilots were all being quarantined from the general population of settlements.
Now he’d just drawn a flight down here to Coopersville. Something to do with the mess in Agriculture, from some things Colonel Hearne had said in the briefing. In normal times he would’ve known all about it, simply by talking to people, but being confined to Flight Ops was keeping him in the dark about most of what was going on in his own home settlement. Sure, he was picking up some stuff from listening to Shepardsport Pirate Radio, but he had a feeling that Autumn Belfontaine had been told to keep a lid on the situation for the moment. Which suggested something seriously bad.
Might as well take a look at his e-mail, see if there was anything of interest. At least cleaning it out would take up some time. Not as much as usual, since a lot of the aviation and astronautics lists were a lot quieter. He hoped their usual participants dirtside were just too busy with relief efforts, not down with the diablovirus or worse.
Some stuff in from the settlements on Mars, from the looks of the headers. Not surprising, since Mars was far enough away to provide an automatic quarantine for anyone going out there from the Earth-Moon system. As long as the settlements there remained free of the diablovirus, life would continue as usual. All of them would have stockpiles of essential supplies, including spares for vital equipment, sufficient to last for at least a few years, so they would have time to work out long-term solutions. Which meant that the people there would have at least some breathing room, and thus some time to relax and chew the fat online.
And then he saw a subject line he’d given up hope on ever seeing. It was a quote from one of Robert Frost’s less well-known poems, a verse that he and his mother had agreed upon as a code way back when he headed off for the Naval Academy and had to face the possibility that e-mail would be censored.
Could his mother have survived after Flannigan’s goons disappeared her in the wake of the disastrous 2012 election? She’d been one of the few governors to offer any substantial resistance to Flannigan’s increasingly hostile measures against clones and people with genetic modifications (two sets with a great deal of overlap), and they’d pretty much assumed that she’d caught a bullet in the back of the head, probably in the basement of a Federal building somewhere.
Hardly daring to hope, Chandler clicked on the e-mail. Would it be a message from his mother?
If it was a message, it wasn’t in the clear. Instead, it was just a poem by Emily Dickenson. The one about clover and bees, which wasn’t any agreed-upon message.
On the other hand, it wasn’t the one about death stopping, which would’ve meant she was definitely gone. Which meant there was hope — but hope could be almost worse than knowing. Where had he read that line about hurting a man who’s lost everything by giving back something broken?