Author: leighkimmel

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Narrative

Fighting Like Brothers

Spruance Del Curtin didn’t like the feeling of being in over his head. He’d only come down here because Brenda Redmond had asked him to, and he had an obligation to her.

But right now he was feeling very much like a fifth wheel. It wasn’t like he was any great whiz in IT Sure, he’d recognized the signs that most everyone down there was on the wrong track and growing more obsessively persistent about it — but once he’d made the necessary connections with people who would actually listen, he had been pretty much peripheral to the actual process of detecting, identifying and eliminating the malware that had infested the servers that managed Shepardsport’s connections with the outside universe.

And when Brenda had called him, she’d been thinking in terms of sorting out that garbled text Kitty Margrave had received from her friend dirtside. That was a puzzle that might have benefited from his connections with Dr. Doorne, who was an expert in signals processing, among other things.

But now that it had been followed by a very disturbing text that looked as if someone were trying very hard to convince everyone that nothing sinister was going on, he was pretty much surplus. However, until it got time that he actually needed to go somewhere, it would be hard for him to leave without looking like he was abandoning everyone.

However, from what he could hear of Betty Margrave’s conversation with Steffi Roderick down in IT, he might be getting a reprieve really soon. Soon they’d have someone up here who was pretty clearly a specialist in getting into other people’s systems without leaving obvious tracks, getting the information they needed, and getting back out without raising alarms. Then he could quietly excuse himself and head off to something that would nominally be something he was more adept at.

And then the door opened. “Hey, Sprue, what did you do to get sent down here this time?”

Sprue had to look up to see which of his clone-brothers had just arrived and was ribbing him. It would be Eli Mallory.

“So you’re the only hacker Steffi was able to scrounge up?” Not his best comeback, but better than nothing.

Betty Margrave looked up. “That’s enough, guys. If the two of you can’t manage to work together peaceably, figure out which one of you will leave.”

Which was the excuse Sprue needed to finally get out of here. “As it just happens, I need to get going if I’m going to get lunch before my air shift.”

Not as sharp as he would’ve liked it, but at least it got him out of here. Let Eli play hacker today. Sprue had other things to do.

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Narrative

Hacker Wanted

Work was the best way to keep the mind occupied, Steffi Roderick told herself. There was no telling how long it might take her brother to notice the e-mail he’d sent here, especially if communications were so snarled that his voice mail wasn’t even engaging and calls went to a busy signal.

And there was always plenty of work around the IT department, even when they weren’t trying to debug someone else’s equipment remotely. She had several projects she needed to touch base with people on — not necessarily urgent things, but still needing accomplished, and soon.

So when her phone rang, she assumed it would be Matt, finally calling her back. Which made it rather embarrassing when the caller proved to be Betty Margrave, calling from the Safety and Security offices.

“I’m looking for a hacker.”

Steffi’s guts clenched with dread. “What have they broken into now?”

“No, it’s not that kind of trouble. I need someone who’s skilled at getting into systems. My niece has been keeping in contact with a friend in Houston, and this friend’s family has been having some serious problems. We just got a text from her that just doesn’t seem right.”

As Betty read the text, Steffi had to agree — there was something fishy about the wording. Like an adult trying to sound like a child, and coming across more like what they thought a child ought to be saying rather than how kids really talked.

“So you’re trying to find out where that message came from, and what’s really going on with this Amy.”

“Exactly. Right now I’m not sure how much I can trust any of my old contacts on the ground down in Houston. I’m thinking we’re going to need to take a look inside some systems we’re not exactly welcome in. Which means I’m going to need the best hacker you can get me.”

The best hacker Steffi knew would be Toni Hargreaves, but she was over at Grissom City, and from what Betty was saying, this job didn’t sound like the sort one could do from verbal descriptions and texted screenshots. Lou Corlin had a lot of raw talent in the area — he’d been instrumental in setting up their streaming server — but he had that Chaffee tendency to be a straight-arrow. Even with the chief of security giving him the go-ahead to get into those systems, he wouldn’t feel that sense of no is a technical challenge that was essential to this kind of hacking.

The next best would be any of several kids she’d immediately thought as probable culprits when she thought Betty was looking to take down a hacker. Every one of those kids had pulled various stunts that weren’t quite bad enough to get them in legal trouble, but still enough to warrant official attention within the settlement.

And most of them were Sheps. On one hand, that might be a good thing — Betty was married to a Shep, so there was a familial obligation.

On the other hand, Sheps were not easy to manage. And if she sent more than one, they might well get so competitive that they’d end up sabotaging each other’s work.

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Narrative

The Watcher at the Window

The guinea pig habitats were quiet this early in the morning. Payton Shaw moved slowly and carefully in the half-light which was supposed to simulate early morning. Guinea pigs seemed to do better when the diurnal cycle imitated the slow increase and decrease of light at dawn and dusk, rather than the lights simply coming on and turning off.

There was a trick to checking the automatic feeders and waterers without having to shine a light directly on the animals and disrupting the regulation of their circadian rhythms and activity cycles. This was the third time this week that Agriculture had reported problems with the automatics, and both Alice Murchison and Ken Redmond were getting fed up.

Especially with everything that’s going on, right now it’s going to be just about impossible to get spare parts. Which means that either we have to machine our own replacements, or we have to kludge together some other solution.

Payton recalled Colonel Hearne’s remarks about logistics. Just what had he meant that day, down by the Wall of Honor?

Over the last several days, Payton had done some discreet inquiries, always careful to mix them in with more innocuous searches in order to obscure any pattern that might attract attention. He did know that the port facility was having trouble getting certain items in, especially certain biologicals for Medlab that they were having difficulty producing up here.

Which could be a real problem if we ran into a major medical crisis. He recalled Colonel Hearne’s comments about Johnson Space Center having trouble staffing even their critical operations. Since then, Payton had also heard that Japan had been forced to shut down most of their Earthside space operations and quarantine both Edo Settlement and their lunar ferry because of a lapse of biosecurity on the part of one of the nations they provided transport for.

Who can I talk to, that might actually know something, but won’t think I’m nosing into places I don’t belong? Payton recalled that his ur-brother had had some film confiscated and classified top secret after his Mercury mission, apparently because he’d unwittingly photographed some super-secret military installations. And when he’d asked President Johnson, he’d been told in no uncertain terms that he should ask no further questions.

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Narrative

Echoes of Home

Today was shaping up to be a rather frustrating day. After a day and a half of working with the Gagarinsk IT people on their network problems, Steffi was no closer to a solution.

Having exhausted the resources of her team here in Shepardsport, she decided it was time to talk to Toni Hargreaves over at Grissom City. Back when they were both working on the Dispater team at JPL, Toni had frequently come up with solutions for problems that had stumped everyone else. More than once she’d spent so much time helping other teams with their intractable problems that she’d ended up having to pull an all-nighter to get her own code written in time.

As they were discussing the ins and outs of networking, the text chime sounded in her ear. Surprised, she pulled the phone away from her ear to take a look.

It was her brother. Call me. Dad’s got a problem.

There was nothing to do but cut her call short and try to reach her brother. “Toni, I’m going to have to let you go. I just got a text from my brother. Something’s happened, and I’d better find out what.”

“No problem. Talk to you later.” Although Toni tried to sound unflustered, Steffi could hear the catch in her voice.

Then she remembered — Toni was from Phoenix. An only child, she’d lost both parents when the old Chinese space station crashed into the city. Even after all these years, she remained a little sensitive about being left with no family but the one she’d made for herself: her husband, her children, and her husband’s various clone-brothers, most of whom lived over here in Shepardsport.

No time to worry about it. Toni was a resilient woman, and right now Steffi needed to find out what was going on with her dad. The last she’d heard, her mother was doing better after what the doctors was pretty sure was a mild heart attack, and it had sounded like she was about ready to be discharged, albeit with the requirement that she and Dad both quarantine themselves at home for three weeks to ensure neither of them had been exposed to the diablovirus.

However, when Steffi dialed Matt’s number, she got only a busy signal. It didn’t even go to voicemail, which suggested something was overloading the circuits.

On the other hand, it was also possible that he’d gotten a new phone and neglected to configure his voicemail. Matt was a good guy, but had a certain tendency to let things slide by him. And if he was calling the rest of the family right now, giving them the heads-up, it might take a while.

Whatever was going on, she couldn’t wait indefinitely. After the third attempt to connect got the same busy signal, Steffi decided it was time to shoot him a quick text. Tried to get through to you, but it’s not even going to voicemail. I’ll try to call later this evening.

Now it was time to get back to work.

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Narrative

Further Searchers

Brenda didn’t like running late on important things, like classes or her mandatory exercise hours. However, she wasn’t going to abandon Kitty to her own devices, not when the girl was clearly terrified for her friend on Earth.

At least Linnea at the gym was understanding. She’d lost her husband a few years ago in the cyber-attack on Slayton Field, and knew the terror of incomplete information in a bad situation. However, Brenda’s senior teacher was not as likely to be flexible — but then, they were trying to teach basic literacy skills to a bunch of little kids, which meant they needed consistency.

I just wish Sprue would get his butt over here. I know he’s got that new project he’s keeping so mum about, but surely it doesn’t take that long to touch base with the principal researcher, or whoever’s his main contact.

Brenda reached for her phone, then checked herself. The last thing Sprue needed was for his phone to chime incoming text right while he was talking with his boss. Sure, SMS was an asynchronous means of communication, but the urge to grab one’s phone and check could be difficult to resist.

Instead, she looked at Kitty’s messenger app yet again, as if this time would suddenly give her the ability to sort some sense from the garbled mess of alphanumeric characters. It really looked as if the packets had become corrupted as they passed through one or another server on the way between Earth and the Moon.

She’d seen some text spam that looked like that — supposedly there were ways to hijack some phones’ OS and turn them into zombie machines for DDOS attacks. She wished Lou Corlin could be here, since he worked for IT. However, this was his air shift, and she was not going to take Kitty down to the station just to talk to Lou.

And then the module airlock cycled, and in walked Spruance Del Curtin. “Sorry I’m late, but I wanted to talk to Dr. Doorne. You do realize she’s a specialist in signals processing. I was hoping she might have some suggestions.”

“So did she?” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Brenda realized just how snarky she sounded.

“A few possibilities, but they may require seeing if the message is still on the server, or if it was erased there as soon as it was downloaded to the phone.”

At that moment Kitty’s phone chimed. There was another message from Amy — or at least her telephone number. However, it didn’t look anything like the last several messages, which had been increasingly fretful. Instead, it was relentlessly upbeat, and had a feeling of having been dictated to her: We have been moved to a new guardian. Do not worry about me. I am healthy and safe, and am keeping up with my schoolwork. Be careful, and keep studying.

When Brenda was younger, before she’d had kids, she’d gone through a period of reading a lot of true-crime. There’d been several cases in which people were kidnapped and forced by their kidnappers to make phone calls or send texts claiming that they were going somewhere for a while, in order to delay suspicion.

She showed the text to Sprue. “What do you think?”

“How old is she supposed to be? This doesn’t look like something a middle-school kid would write.”

He looked straight at Kitty. “I think we’d better take this to your Aunt Betty. If something fishy is going on, she’s a lot better equipped to handle it.”

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Narrative

Searching

Being Chief of Security for a major lunar settlement did have its perks, Betty Margrave had to admit. For one thing, it gave her access to databases not available to ordinary citizens. Databases that might help her track down Kitty’s friend Amy.

However, the further Betty searched, the more concerned she became. Ordinarily she should’ve had the girl’s location pinpointed within a few searches, especially since Kitty had given her the phone number.

Just how bad were things getting down there? Houston was a major port city, with ships coming and going every day. Maybe not the level of traffic as they’d experienced during the Energy Wars, when they’d been shipping POL’s to the troops in the Middle East, but the port of Houston still handled a lot of traffic — which meant people coming and going, a perfect situation for the spread of a dangerous new virus.

Which is what makes Slayton Field so high risk too. Betty pushed the thought out of her mind. She knew her opposite numbers in Grissom City were keeping a close eye on the situation — just yesterday she’d been teleconferencing with Greg Shipton and Cather Hargreaves on just that subject, going over quarantine procedures for a spaceport that had to be kept operating to support the myriad scientific and mining outposts scattered across the lunar surface.

Still, that little thread of worry crept along the back of her mind. Carl was to fly over there tomorrow, to deliver biologicals and pick up some minerals. According to the flight plan, he and his pilot would stay in the lander the entire time they were there, and interact with ground crew only by radio. He was probably safer there than in takeoff or landing.

In the meantime, she had a girl to track down. The last Kitty knew, Amy had gone with the parents of a friend while her own parents were both taken to the hospital. However, her cellphone metadata wasn’t showing her as being at that location.

In fact, for the last fifteen hours there was no metadata at all for her. Could the logging systems be that badly behind? Or could her phone have been confiscated and turned off for some transgression, real or imaginary?

Which left Betty with the problem of how to find out, when she was uncertain whether her authority up here would translate into anything meaningful down there.

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Narrative

Paying the Bills

In the smoking ruins of our world, will the struggle for yesterday’s technology spark tomorrow’s global war? A new postapocalyptic novel, in which a young cowboy claims his destiny—and tries to prevent a catastophic war—from New York Times best-selling author John Ringo, Kacey Ezell, and Christopher L. Smith.

WAR IN THE SMOKING RUINS OF TOMORROW!

Thirty years ago, the world ended. Giant electrovoric ants and pterodons came through a rift in space-time, millions of humans died, and that was that. Without electricity, human ingenuity has provided some creative work-arounds to the energy problem, but most people survive at subsistence level.

For Chuck Gordon, the simple life of a rancher was enough. But then he met a mysterious dying stranger and now he’s on the road of destiny across America accompanied by a warrior monk, a beautiful dragon tamer, a runaway cultist, and a mystic drunken lecher—all searching for the key to reclaiming humanity’s past—and future.

At the publisher’s request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

About The Valley of Shadows by John Ringo:
“. . . fast-paced . . . building to an exciting climax . . . Ringo and Massa have written an end-of-the-world novel that is unconventional and entertaining.”—Daily News of Galveston County

About Black Tide Rising, coedited by John Ringo (featuring stories by Kacey Ezell and Christopher L. Smith):
“. . . an entertaining batch of . . . action-packed tales. Certainly, fans of Ringo’s particular brand of action-adventure will be pleased.”—Booklist

“This anthology broadens Ringo’s Black Tide world, serving up doses of humanity amid the ravenous afflicted. Comedy has a place in this harsh reality, and these stories stir adventure and emotion at a frantic clip throughout. Zombie fiction fans will be thrilled.”—Library Journal

About the Black Tide Rising Series:
“Not only has Ringo found a mostly unexplored corner of the zombie landscape, he’s using the zombie frame to tackle a broader theme: the collapse and rebirth of civilization. The zombie scenes are exciting, sure, but its the human story that keeps us involved. A fine series.”—Booklist on the Black Tide Rising Series

About John Ringo:
“[Ringo’s work is] peopled with three-dimensional characters and spiced with personal drama as well as tactical finesse.”—Library Journal

“. . . Explosive. . . . Fans . . . will appreciate Ringo’s lively narrative and flavorful characters.”—Publishers Weekly

“. . . practically impossible not to read in one sitting . . . exceedingly impressive . . . executed with skill, verve, and wit.”—Booklist

“Crackerjack storytelling.”—Starlog

About the work of Kacey Ezell:

“Gritty, dark and damp. Much like the war itself.”—Michael Z. Williamson, best-selling author of A Long Time Until Now

“I loved Minds of Men.”—D.J. Butler, best-selling author of Witchy Eye

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Narrative

Reflections

All the way to Miskatonic Sector and Dr. Doorne’s office, Spruance Del Curtin kept thinking about his discussion with Cindy. He’d never really thought about societies that way. Back in Houston, they’d studied about the history of government, from the early god-kings of Egypt and Mesopotamia to Greek democracy and the Roman republic, and how both Greece and Rome had been models for the Founding Fathers. But their teachers had never really dug into the whys and wherefores of how the different forms of government related to how people within their societies related to one another.

Now a lot of stuff made sense — like why all the nation-building in certain parts of the world kept failing and countries kept descending into warlordism just as soon as the troops left. He recalled an image he’d seen recently on the newsroom TV, of Israeli soldiers trying to distribute emergency food packages to a crowd of people who were all pushing and shoving to get to the front and grab something. Even with a number of the soldiers pushing back, trying to make sure everyone had a fair crack at the food, it was clear that some people were grabbing several and others were being pushed aside, if not outright trampled underfoot.

Other than Israel, the Middle East had been a mess long before the Energy Wars. And now that mess made a lot more sense in terms of a lack of basic trust beyond the family unit, the clan, the tribe.

Which raised the next question — how did it relate to all those data sets he was doing for Dr. Doorne? Were they so different because they were data from different countries with different levels of social cohesion?

Except he couldn’t come right out and ask her, not as long as there were still data sets needing sanitized. If he knew what he was working with, it would compromise his ability to do an unbiased job.

On the other hand, there might be other ways of approaching the problem. The data had to come from somewhere, and likely he knew someone who would know.

Even as he was contemplating that problem, his phone chimed. He pulled it out to find a message from Brenda Redmond. We’ve got a problem. I’m going to need some help.

Sprue felt a rising annoyance at her assumption that he’d jump right in. Then he remembered her husband was a Shep, so she had just as much lineage-right as Autumn Belfontaine. Better deal with it, so that he didn’t have to deal with Drew’s wrath when the restrictions were lifted and pilots could visit family again.

What’s wrong?

Kitty just got a garbled message from a friend dirtside, and now she’s on the edge of panic. We need to figure out what’s going on, and right now her aunt’s dealing with some kind of mess down at the port facility.

It took a moment for Sprue to realize what she was talking about. Yes, Cindy’s little sister Kitty had been worried this morning. She kept sneaking peeks at her phone at breakfast, even though you weren’t supposed to be using your phone in the dining commons. Hadn’t Brenda gone over to their apartment last week or so, some kind of thing about a friend in Houston having an emergency and needing an adult to sort things out?

Right now I need to meet with my new boss. But as soon as we’re done talking, I’ll see what I can do to help.

OK. TTYL

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Narrative

Things to Worry About

There were times when Brenda Redmond wished she didn’t have the morning drive-time air shift at Shepardsport Pirate Radio. It was a news-heavy shift, which meant getting to hear all about everything that was going on in the world — which these days meant everything going wrong in the world.

And the news report Autumn Belfontaine had been delivering right at the end of Brenda’s shift was particularly worrisome. If a worker in the Indian Space Agency’s pre-flight quarantine facility could pass the diablovirus to their astronauts and infect the entire Japanese LEO space station and lunar ferry, how safe were America’s facilities? Especially considering that it wasn’t just NASA any more, with McHenery Aerospace and several other private companies launching crewed spacecraft from commercial spaceports. They were supposed to follow the same pre-flight quarantine procedures as NASA astronauts — but there’d been issues of corner-cutting on other safety procedures, so who was to say they weren’t getting lax there too.

All it would take is one person.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if Drew had been down at Coopersville, but he was stationed at Slayton Field. Grissom City was not only the largest and oldest lunar settlement, but also the busiest spaceport city. Which meant Drew would be right on the front lines in terms of his risk of exposure.

But she couldn’t let her worries about him leak into her communications to him. She knew the risks — it came with being a military spouse. And it wasn’t fair to the other pilot-astronauts’ wives for her to worry too obviously when they had their own burdens.

Better to focus on the things she had some level of control over. Her work, her training and gym time, her teaching responsibility. And taking care of the kids, of course.

Her phone chimed: incoming text message. She pulled it out, halfway hoping it was Drew.

No, it was Kitty Margrave. Call me. We need to talk.

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Narrative

The Ill Wind

As Lou Corlin arrived at the station offices, he considered that he might have spend more time than he should’ve on the traffic analysis Steffi Roderick had given him. Sure, it was a really thorny problem, but he also knew he had responsibilities the next day, including his air shift and his training.

But the whole time he was looking over that data, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was overlooking something important. That maybe everyone was overlooking something important, because they were so certain they knew what kind of problem they were looking at.

Which is what happened when we were locked out of the Internet. The symptoms resembled prior DDOS attacks so much that nobody in IT paused to wonder why it was intermittent, or why the usual remedies didn’t work. And then Sprue asked a couple of awkward questions, Steffi insisted they needed answers, and suddenly a whole bunch of weirdness had reasons.

And speaking of Spruance Del Curtin, he was here early today, and talking with Cindy. Not that scheming sort of talk that suggested he was trying to gain points, or wheedle something out of her without looking like he was obviously trying to gain a favor. No, he seemed to be actually discussing something with her.

Lou recalled hearing that Colonel Hearne had abandoned the syllabus last night in Constitution class and got into a whole lot of heavy stuff about how societies work. Of course the standard syllabus was intended for a typical public school classroom, so it probably wouldn’t be that hard for a class up here to catch back up to where they were supposed to be in plenty of time to take the test.

Much as he’d like to hear more about just exactly what Colonel Hearne had said, Lou could tell now was not the time to butt in on Cindy and Sprue’s discussion. Not to mention that he needed to get ready to do his air shift.

That was when Autumn Belfontaine poked her head out of the newsroom. “Lou, can I talk with you for a moment?”

“Sure.” Lou joined her in the newsroom, wondering what could be going on.

“I’d like for you to verify my understanding of some news releases in Japanese.”

As Lou skimmed over them, an icy knot of dread formed in the pit of his stomach. “It looks like they’re pretty much shutting down the Earthside part of their space program. Reading between the lines, it looks like they’re focusing on protecting their installations here on the Moon and on Mars from contagion.”

“Which strongly suggests those Indian astronauts did spread the diablovirus to the Sakura, but its medstaff detected it in time, so they didn’t spread it to Luna Station or anyone on the ground.”

“But they’re never going to come out and actually say that, because that would mean losing face.” Lou paused. “Or perhaps putting their Indian partners in a face-threatening situation.”

The fall of China’s “flying junkyard” and the destruction of Phoenix was before Lou’s time, but he’d studied it in enough classes to have a pretty strong awareness of the role played by fear of losing face in the decision chains of the Chinese Communist Party in those last fateful days and weeks. Spaceflight was no longer such a touchy national prestige thing for Japan, but the issues were still there.

And there was also the implication for the American and Russian space programs. Lou had already heard there were problems with infections at several of NASA’s space centers causing staffing shortages, and he wouldn’t be at all surprised if the Imperial space program was getting hit by the problems too.

And all it would take is one careless person somewhere in the process of clearing people for spaceflight to get it up here too. We’ve been lucky so far, but how much longer will our luck hold?