Category: Narrative

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Narrative

An Unpleasant Summons

Spruance Del Curtin had just finished breakfast and was intending to head over to Science to do some preparations before his teaching responsibility. As he headed down the escalator from the dining commons, his phone chimed incoming text.

Surprised, he reached for his phone, then realized the last thing he wanted was to be engrossed in reading when he reached the bottom of the escalator and needed to step off smoothly. Surely it was something that could wait the minute or so to make sure he didn’t fall. While it was true one didn’t fall nearly as hard here on the Moon as on Earth, falling onto a running escalator could still be a very dangerous thing.

Safely on a stationary surface again, Sprue pulled out his phone. To his astonishment, the message was from Colonel Hearne down in Flight Ops. My office, ASAP. I need to talk to you.

Sprue’s guts went cold. Why was the head of Flight Ops contacting him? Not to mention the choice of words, which suggested a bawling-out, not a conversation.

Which meant there was no telling how long he might be tied up. Better to give Training a heads-up, let them know he might be late.

He hadn’t even gotten to the inter-sector airlock before the response came: we have it under control.

Not exactly the most reassuring response right now. It suggested Colonel Hearne had gone to Deena ahead of time to arrange things.

By the time Sprue got to Innsmouth Sector and Flight Ops, he was sick with dread. At least Colonel Hearne wasn’t busy, and wasn’t the sort of person who kept people waiting as a power play.

The older man was brusque and direct. “Sit down.”

As soon as Sprue was seated, Colonel Hearne launched straight into business, without any small talk or other preliminaries. “Since you don’t seem to understand a polite request to stop nosing into matters that we have very good reasons not to want publicly discussed, Captain Waite asked me to make some things plain to you. Number one: we have a very good reason to keep specific numbers relating to the pandemic quiet. This is not just to thwart your curiosity for the pleasure of exercising authority. Right now, we are looking at the very real possibility that the diablovirus will keep spreading until it runs out of susceptible individuals. To put it in very plain terms, we’re talking about losing thirty to forty percent of the global population on Earth. Depending upon exactly what parts of the population those losses are concentrated in, that’s dangerously close to the level at which it becomes difficult to maintain a technological civilization. At the moment we have hope that there will be enough to rebuild.

“However, if these sorts of figures get out in the general population, or worse, a distorted version of them gets out, we have the very real possibility of a panic. Frightened people do irrational things, and that could very well include destroying the very things they will need to sustain and rebuild technological civilization on Earth. Or worse, lead to a panic in one or more lunar settlements, if enough of the population comes to believe that Earth is effectively lost.”

He paused, letting those words sink in. “Have you even considered that your determined efforts to gain access to this sort of information might have such consequences?”

Sprue swallowed hard against the lump forming in his throat. He’d never considered that this sort of information could be dangerous. “No, sir.”

“And that brings us to Number Two. We thought that by bringing you into a privileged position and allowing you to work with some of the data, you would come to an understanding of the significance of what you were working with. Since this clearly is not the case, we are going to have to take a second look at the responsibilities with which you are entrusted, and evaluate where we may need to reduce or remove them.

“In particular, your work as a DJ with Shepardsport Pirate Radio puts you in a position that enables you to present information to the general public. As a result, we have decided to remove you from your air shift until we see clear indications that you understand the importance of these restrictions. In the meantime, Payton Shaw will be covering your air shifts. Therefore, you will be taking over some of his responsibilities to compensate. Do you understand?”

Sprue’s guts clenched, making him feel nauseous. But there was no satisfactory answer except a meek and subdued, “Yes, sir.”

“Good. Then the third and final point should come as no surprise. Because we need to be confident that you are truly taking responsibility, and not just giving us surface obedience to game the system, you will be working under very close supervision during this period. Yes, it will involve some adjustments, but given the current situation, we cannot take any further chances on you until we are confident that you understand the importance of this situation.”

This is gonna suck, hard.

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Narrative

When the Music Stops

Lou Corlin wondered whether he should ask Brenda whether the information had been useful. If he’d erred in his choice of files, he’d really want to know so he could put the matter to rights. At the same time, he knew that she might not be completely comfortable about discussing it, especially since he had gone to some sketchy websites to get those files.

Maybe it would be better if he just let her take the lead. He might be able to drop a hint or two about the matter, but pushing would be most definitely unwise right now.

When he arrived at the station to begin his air shift, the first thing he noticed was Spruance Del Curtin talking with the program director. Lou’s first thought was what did Sprue do this time? Even as the thought came to him, he knew that such a conversation would not take place just outside the door to the program director’s office. No, this was a more neutral conversation.

All the same, it would be bad form to show any interest in it. Best to keep his eyes front and walk purposefully past the station offices and into the studio areas.

Brenda was on the air with a listener right now. From the speed of the back-and-forth, that person was somewhere up here on the Moon, not down on Earth.

Not surprising, if Earth is as bad off as things are sounding.

As the implication hit, Lou stiffened and cast an awkward look around. He’d been in his teens when the Expulsions hit, so he’d been old enough to have made some friends at school who weren’t from the NASA clone creche.

And I never really tried to keep in contact with them after I came up here.

He’d told himself that he really wasn’t all that close with those kids, and a lot of them had parents who weren’t really comfortable with their children being close friends with astronaut clones. So it had been easy to drift apart once he was up here, busy getting oriented and up to speed.

But now he was wondering what had happened to some of those kids. Even if they hadn’t been close enough to borrow stuff from, they’d at least been friendly enough to give him the time of day. And he hadn’t even thought about what might be happening to them back in Houston.

On the air, Brenda was winding up her conversation with the caller. Of course she would need to — it was rapidly getting close to time for her to prepare the next set so they could hand off without creating any dead air.

Now that the ON AIR light had gone off, he needed to put aside his curiosity as to the situation on Earth, with people he’d lost contact with years ago. Right now he needed to concentrate on his professional duties as a DJ.

Brenda stepped out of the DJ booth, greeted him and began the standard rundown of where everything stood at the end of her show. And then, as she was about to hand it off to him, she leaned over to whisper into his ear, “I gave Autumn a copy of the files. I want her to look over them before I try to send them to Drew.”

Although it caught Lou by surprise, he was able to maintain enough control over his expression that he didn’t show it. He just gave her a quick nod as he acknowledged the hand-over.

Yet as he closed the door of the DJ booth behind him, her words still nagged at him. Of course Autumn would understand about protecting sources — she might not have even asked Brenda where or how she’d come about those files. But depending on how far Autumn took it, there would be a possibility that they would end up in the hands of someone who had the necessary expertise to track them back to him.

No use worrying about it. He had a show to run, and the seconds were ticking down to when he needed to do his first station identification.

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Narrative

Hard Data

Medlab was quiet this early in the morning, which made Barbie Thuc’s office all the better for a private conversation. And from what Ursula Doorne had said, it sounded like this was not something that either of them would want to get overheard.

The radio astronomer arrived as requested, through the employee and supplies entrance rather than the check-in entrance. Right now it was just as well to keep this meeting as quiet as possible. They’d had enough trouble with rumors circulating around the settlement already, and didn’t need any more of them.

“I’ve brought a copy of the latest data.” She held up a USB stick with an unremarkable blue plastic body. “This way you can go over it yourself.”

They ended up linking Ursula’s laptop with the big monitor that got a lot more use looking at X-rays and other medical imaging. When you were looking at a lot of data and the analysis of it, larger images were almost always better.

On the other hand, she wasn’t sure exactly how well positive words like “better” fit the data they were looking at. Even from what little information she could get via official channels, she knew that the situation at Schirrasburg was bad. But now that she was seeing the numbers, she had to fight down a surge of anger that NASA and HHR had suppressed the information to the point even senior medical personnel were unable to obtain it.

“I should not have had to get this by back-channel methods, and neither should my opposite numbers at Grissom City or Coopersville or any of the other settlements up here. If we’d been appraised of the situation from the beginning, we would’ve had that much more time to prepare. Instead, we’re going to be running to catch up.”

“You’re telling me.” Yes, Ursula Doorne was holding back a considerable amount of anger herself. “I only knew what to look for because my husband is a pilot-astronaut and knows some people over there. He’s the one who first told me how bad it was, although he just had general figures, not hard data like this.” She gestured at the charts and graphs that now covered the huge monitor, the columns of numbers on her laptop.

“And now the only thing we can do is prepare as best we can. We’ve got the advantage of a compartmentalized structure that makes isolation much easier, even if we can’t keep it out altogether. But I’m wondering how bad things are going to get on Earth. If they end up losing such a high proportion of their population, can technological society even survive?

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Narrative

The Spaces Between

Reggie Waite had been a little surprised to get the text from Autumn Belfontaine. Given the situation, he’d granted her pretty much a blank check to use her own judgement in covering the diablovirus pandemic. Which suggested that she’d found something she considered too hot to handle alone.

Which was why he’d told her to come up and talk with him rather than say that she shouldn’t worry about it. Trusting her judgment went both ways. If she said something was bigger than she wanted to handle on her own, it probably was.

So here she was, looking notably uncomfortable. Not nervous like someone being called on the carpet for some shortcoming, but like she had some seriously bad news to report and was trying to figure out whether to break it to him gently or just drop the bomb on him.

Reggie invited her to sit down, offered her coffee, which she politely declined. Now that the courtesies had been satisfied, he could get down to business.

“I understand you have some material you are concerned about releasing.”

Autumn handed him a USB stick, a completely unremarkable black shell of the sort that were cranked out by the million, so cheap they could be used for promotional purposes. “It has a number of video files that the Administration probably would find embarrassing, as well as some data files I believe they are deliberately suppressing.” She paused to consider what to say next. “Given their uncertain provenance, I thought it would be wise to run it past you before I put anything in the public view.”

The careful wording suggested she was protecting a source. Steffi had mentioned that someone had been visiting the dark side of the Internet. She’d been concerned mostly because of the disreputable sorts of porn one could find there, and the high risk that downloads could carry malware.

“I’ll look it over.” Reggie kept one computer specifically for examining questionable materials of this sort. Steffi had set it up specifically to have no connections to any other computer, and with some of the best anti-malware protections that didn’t require a specialist to use. “You might be able to help me sort through the files and identify the most relevant ones.”

It was a little awkward when she leaned over his shoulder to point out some file names, but he reminded himself that genetically she was his niece, the daughter of a clone-brother. Never mind that he and Lucius Belfontaine had never met — Reggie was still flying F-18’s off carriers when Belfontaine had died in the NASA Massacre — the connection was still very real.

Just focus on the material, not the person presenting it.

And Autumn knew those files up, down, sideways and backward. Not surprising for a news reporter. You had to be able to find the right file without a lot of wasted when your got back to the station and needed to file your report. Especially if you were prepping clips to play on air.

By the time Reggie had gone through the relevant material, he was shaken in a way he hadn’t been since the Kitty Hawk Massacre. “This is some pretty hot stuff. I think we’d better talk this over with Betty Margrave before we put any of it on the air. On second thought, let’s also have Dr. Thuc take a look at that epidemiological data.”

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Narrative

Troubling Conclusions

Over the years, Ursula Doorne had done a lot of work with statistics. Modern radio astronomy was just too heavily dependent upon statistical analysis of massive amounts of data for a professional astronomer to not master that subject. And since she’d come up here to the Moon, she’d been involved in analyzing data on projects very far afield from her actual specialties.

However, she’d never looked at any data as disturbing as what had just come in from Schirrasburg’s Medlab. What Tanner had told her was scuttlebutt, rumint, hearsay. But the numbers scrolling across the screen before her were the course of illness for one after another human being.

No, she was not going to have Spruance Del Curtin sanitize this data for analysis. That kid was just too damned perceptive, and he had the Shepard attitude about working the system.

What really worried her was the simple fact that this was not a random selection of people from a general population, as data from a dirtside hospital would’ve been. You didn’t get up here unless you were fit and healthy, and the mandatory exercise ensured you maintained your fitness. That meant she was working with a much higher health baseline than any data coming from Earth.

The typical epidemic hit hardest among the most vulnerable populations: the very young, the very old, those with pre-existing conditions, and those whose lives were in perpetual disarray. And in the early days of the diablovirus pandemic, anecdotal evidence would seem to have borne that out. She still remembered the human-interest spots on various news stations’ websites about it sweeping through homeless camps, the desperate searches for next-of-kin for deceased who often had only the most tenuous ties to society. And of course the nursing homes — she’d gotten some letters from home about various elderly relatives falling ill, being taken to the hospital, not making it.

In fact, she had gotten an impression that the diablovirus had cut a pretty clean swathe through those parts of the dirtside population Rather like those early villages up in the mountains of Asia, where travelers were reporting nothing but corpses in the houses, and domestic animals wandering the streets and fields.

But a healthy population, mostly in the late-twenties to early-fifties demographics, should not be showing the patterns of deaths and serious illnesses she was seeing — unless the disease itself was one of those statistical outliers that somehow combined high communicability with severe symptoms. Ursula wasn’t by any means an expert on infectuous diseases, but as she understood things, the higher the communicability, the less severe an illness tended to be, for the simple reason that if the disease hit people hard, they didn’t move around as much and spread the disease as far.

Which did not bode well for the other lunar settlements. A single breach of quarantine, a careless moment, could spell disaster.

And she knew as well as anyone that astronauts were still human beings, with the same basic needs and drives as everyone else. Which made it all the more likely that someone, somewhere, would commit just a little rules breach, and it would be just enough.

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Narrative

On the Scent of a Story

Over the course of her career in radio news, Autumn Belfontaine had been in plenty of sticky situations. Her very first political assignment had been to cover a demonstration that turned into a “police riot.” She’d gotten out mostly because her news director had told her to stay on the periphery and do man-on-the-street interviews, which meant she didn’t have to push her way out of a crowd.

Just coming up here to the Moon had started as a brief visit to cover the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the original Apollo landing. When Captain Waite had discovered she was the daughter of Lucius Belfontaine, he’d invited her over here to Shepardsport for a visit. She hadn’t expected to get the go-ahead to extend her stay — rescheduling a spaceflight wasn’t exactly like changing an airline ticket — and now she wondered whether someone knew the Expulsions were in the works.

However, she’d never expected to be handed a USB stick full of hot video files by one of the DJs. Although Shepardsport Pirate Radio was all about getting the truth out when the Flannigan Administration was trying to suppress it, there were still limits.

Not to mention the problems created by the uncertain provenance of these files. Given Brenda’s evasive answers about how she’d gotten them, Autumn was pretty sure someone had been poking around on the dark side of the Internet. Malware was everyone’s first concern about those iffy parts of the information superhighway, but for someone in the news business, there as also the problem of whether these could be considered reliable sources.

She knew all too well about the stories that had blown up in various reporters’ faces. Some of it was just plain dishonesty, with sources and accounts fabricated out of whole cloth. But there were more than a few cases of reporters who wanted to believe a little too badly, and had failed to do their due diligence on following up.

On the other hand, if she could get confirmation on some of this material from sources she could trust, she had one hell of a story. No, not just a story, but two, which needed to be treated separately.

Time to do some digging. Now that she knew what to look for, things might be getting a whole lot easier to track down.

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Narrative

How Thin the Margins

The lunar community was fortunate in one way, Barbie Thuc reflected as she made her daily rounds. They started with a much higher baseline health than most communities dirtside.

That meant there was a whole range of ailments she simply didn’t have to deal with. Take for instance the diseases of obesity. People with weight problems to the point it affected their health couldn’t get the necessary medical clearance for spaceflight. And once people got here, mandatory exercise requirements made sure they didn’t slip-slide into it.

Even over at Grissom City, which had catered to the tourist trade before the present crisis, no amount of money could buy one’s way past that requirement. More than a few spoiled-rotten scions of wealth and privilege had learned that the hard way, and had to either learn the necessary self-discipline to meet the physical requirements, or give up their dreams of a vacation on the Moon.

The population here also was much younger. That would change now that the Expulsions meant people would be retiring up here rather than being shipped back to Earth when they reached the age at which the cumulative wear and tear on the body started showing up in the form of degenerative diseases. But at least for the next decade or so she shouldn’t have to worry that much about that.

On the other hand, they did have a lot more injuries to deal with. Maybe not all that much different in terms of the population as a whole, but it was certainly a lot more of her caseload. Which meant a lot of Medstaff’s time and resources went to fixing people up after they’d busted themselves up in various ways.

And that was one of the things she was becoming concerned about. What would happen when vital resources began to run low, if shipments of supplies from Earth were not restored, or could not be relied upon?

Some, even most, could be produced locally, although they might still have problems with the amount they could produce. Most drugs were a matter of chemical synthesis. But there were some things, particularly some of the more sophisticated medical devices, that were still simply beyond the ability to reproduce locally. Which meant that once they ran out, they would have to face the problem of people dying or being left permanently debilitated by conditions that they should’ve been able to recover from.

Which meant raising the question of rationing. How should the few remaining supplies be allocated, if it looked like they could not be replaced for a month? a year? a decade?

She didn’t think “ever” was really an issue. On a world where human life was completely dependent upon sophisticated technology, there was a floor beneath which they could not fall and survive. Therefore, even if Earth had to be written off, it would be only a matter of time before lunar industry would regroup and begin to expand and innovate to replace the manufacturing capacity that they’d lost access to. Most likely it would not take more than a decade or two — but in the meantime things could get painful.

Definitely this was not a decision she should be making on her own, or even with only the other members of Medstaff here. She needed to start raising the question with her colleagues at the other settlements, and with the command structure. Do it carefully, so as to avoid tilting the conversation in any particular direction, but make the decision-makers aware that criteria and procedures needed to be developed and in place before they had to make the determination that a patient would not be treated so that other patients who would be more likely to benefit could have it, before they had to deal with angry family members, before the angry murmurs and pointing fingers could begin.

Yes, there was a certain element of military discipline in the space community — every spacecraft and space settlement was under the command of a senior pilot-astronaut who was also a military officer. But NASA had been a civilian organization from its beginnings, and no settlement, not even the earliest moonbases, had ever tried to impose full military discipline upon its civilian technical staff. And the Expulsions had given Shepardsport a large population who were still in the process of acculturating into the space community.

Which could make things more difficult as the crisis progresses beyond the terror of the initial virgin-field pandemic to the privations of long-term survival and rebuilding.

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Narrative

Making Do

Getting the go-ahead to fabricate low-temperature bearings had proven easier than Ken had expected. After all, they were dealing with parts for landers, which meant all kinds of very technical FAA regulations. Quite honestly, he’d expected Reggie to balk hard, to say no way in hell was this project going through on his watch.

On the other hand, this was an emergency situation, and a lot of slack got cut when your back was against the wall. Although Ken had spent the Energy Wars stateside, overseeing maintenance operations at one or another airbase, he’d heard plenty of war stories from the guys who’d been in the sandbox. Guys who’d been downed in a hot landing zone and had to make emergency repairs with whatever they could cobble together — stuff that would put a plane out of spec if it had been done in a peacetime situation, let alone a civilian aircraft. But when the enemy was breathing down your neck, you did what it took to let you get back to friendly territory, and sorted things out afterward.

Up here the enemy wasn’t religious fanatics who believed God wanted them to kill infidels. The natural world could be far more relentless than any terrorist, and just as deadly. In normal times, specifications and procedures kept you safe. But in an emergency, blindly following procedures could become a case of following a rule straight over a cliff.

And Reggie was a combat veteran. He’d spent most of the Energy Wars flying off carriers, and he’d had all the training those guys got to prepare them for the possibility of being downed in enemy territory, of being captured and held prisoner, all things that required more than a cookbook approach.

Now that they were beginning the production process — he couldn’t really call it a line, because it was going to be a small-batch process — he needed to convince Bill Hearne down at Flight Ops to actually test their product. He’d been an astronaut for decades, plenty of time to grow set in his ways — but he was also the last commander of the Falcon, and keeping his crew alive until Nekrasov and the Baikal could rescue them had taken some incredible feats of improvisation.

As it turned out, Bill was already waiting for Ken when he arrived at Flight Ops. Yes, it had been a good idea to send all the documentation down for review ahead of time.

“You’ve got some pretty ambitious plans here, Ken. I know your guys do good work, but this isn’t exactly the thing you can spitball together with chewing gum and baling wire like we used to do the chiller in the milkhouse back on the farm. This stuff’s running a hell of a lot colder than any Freon setup.”

“True, but if we wait until we completely run out of spares, what do we do when half the lander fleet is grounded? We may not be making as many orbital runs to Luna Station these days, but we’re still making all those suborbital hops to the outlying settlements that don’t have their own greenhouse farms or manufacturing, or a whole laundry list of things that work a lot better at scale.”

When he got Bill’s agreement on that front, he pressed home his real ask. “So what we’ll do is set all the existing spare parts aside for the actual landers, and start testing the ones we’re manufacturing here on ground-based applications. Start with the stationary cryo-pumps. I know there are plenty around here. Then we start using them on the crawlers, since they have cryo-pumps in their fuel cell systems. If they hold up to those uses, we can start judiciously using them in the landers.”

“In which case I’ll have to find volunteers to test-fly every one that we put a non-standard low-temperature bearing in, before they can be re-certified for routine operations. Just like Slayton Field had to re-certify every goddamn lander after the cyber-attack.”

“Of course.” Ken had learned those requirements back when he was a second lieutenant overseeing maintenance back in his Air Force days. “Now we have a procedure to go by, and we can evaluate it as we proceed.”

Right now, even a small victory was a welcome one. And he had a bad feeling that the shortage of spare low-temperature bearings was just the first of many chokepoints that was coming down the pike.

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Narrative

High Anxiety

Brenda Redmond wasn’t sure whether she felt better or worse after giving the news director a copy of Lou’s little treasure trove of information. She’d been careful not to leave anything on it that could trace it back to Lou, so she shouldn’t be putting him at risk. On the other hand, Lou had gotten it specifically because Drew was wanting the information, not so she could pass it around.

Except giving Autumn Belfontaine a copy wasn’t exactly “passing it around.” Autumn was a professional, and part of being a reporter was knowing when to be discreet. She’d even commented on the issue of needing to protect one’s sources, which made it plain she recognized the issue.

For that matter, maybe Autumn could give her some pointers on how to get it to Drew without attracting attention. Right now she could certainly use some advice, since her ever-so-carefully worded hints had apparently zoomed right past him.

Today the kids were eating lunch with their classes. Normally she would’ve been happy not to have to keep them corralled in the dining commons, but right now she really could’ve used the distraction to get her mind off her worries.

Maybe she could meet up with a colleague or two, talk shop…

And then she saw Cindy Margrave, looking very alone and very worried. Sometimes lending a listening ear to someone with worse problems helped take your mind off your own.

“Want some company?”

Cindy gestured toward the seat beside her. “Go ahead. I don’t know why everybody’s decided I’m toxic all of a sudden. I mean, sure I’ve got Constitution test coming up, but it’s not like I’m going to jinx everyone else.”

Brenda quick suppressed the urge to laugh at the notion. Until Cindy could laugh at her own fears, it would sound too much like ridicule. “I know, it’s scary because it’s make or break. They’re always warning you that you have to pass to graduate, but it’s not nearly as hard as they make it sound.”

“That’s what everybody tells us, but Colonel Hearne gives us really tough quizzes.”

Brenda leaned over to Cindy and kept her voice low. “I’ll let you in on a secret. The actual test you have to pass is standardized, from the state department of education. That means it’s going to cover the basics, not whatever esoteric matters of interpretation. They’re trying to measure our ability to be good citizens, not constitutional lawyers.”

That was just absurd enough to get a laugh. Not a nervous giggle, but an actual laugh. “I sure hope you’re right.”

“Actually, your biggest danger is going to be trying to overthink the questions, especially if you’re used to having to watch out for traps. If it’s the same test I took, all the questions are straightforward. Use your common sense and you’ll do fine.”

Seeing Cindy’s relief, Brenda guided the conversation to more neutral topics.

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Narrative

Behind the Rumors

Autumn Belfontaine hadn’t like the paucity of information coming out of Schirrasburg ever since they closed up, and the longer things went, the more it bothered her. Something was going on, and if they were keeping it quiet to “prevent panic,” that made it sound all the more frightening.

Although she didn’t have any close friends over there, she did have a few contacts. But texts and e-mails went unanswered, or just plain bounced. Which meant that they’d not only cut off all physical interaction; they’d also descended a cone of silence over Schirrasburg’s Internet connections. Given that Schirrasburg had a much heavier scientific focus than Grissom City or Shepardsport, such stringent measures were downright extreme.

Scientists talked to each other as much as reporters did, if not more. A big part of doing science was reporting your discoveries to your colleagues so they could verify them independently.

Autumn tried to imagine what would happen if Reggie Waite were to announce that Shepardsport was deliberately instituting not only a physical quarantine, but an informational one as well. The scientists had been unhappy enough during the Internet outage, but they’d accepted it as a malfunction, and had endured as best they could while IT worked to resolve it. That best had included a lot of grousing among themselves, and several of her reporters had either teaching responsibilities or work in Science.

Unless there were a damned good reason, like a truly nasty malware spreading through the Internet, the howling would be so intense it would probably register on the seismographs in the science packages at the old Apollo landing sites. There were probably dozens of scientific investigations going on that depended upon daily transmissions of data back and forth between multiple sites, both on the Moon and on Earth. Interrupt that flow of data, and it might set someone back years, even waste millions of dollars if it were something that couldn’t be put on pause while waiting for data.

Which meant that whatever was going on at Schirrasburg was so serious that the scientists were accepting this restriction without any measurable resistance. If it weren’t a diablovirus outbreak, why else would they shut off communications with the outside world under the rubric of preventing panic?

On the other hand, if it was diablovirus, the very fact that it hadn’t spread to any of the other lunar settlements was reassuring. It meant that diablovirus could be identified and contained before even essential travel could spread it.

But she also recognized that all of this was speculation, on far too slender of evidence to go on the air about it. Especially if this might well be an actual legitimate reason to suppress information.

Her thoughts were disturbed by someone calling her name. She looked up to find Brenda Redmond standing just inside the newsroom door. “You need to talk to me?”

Brenda pulled out a USB stick. “I’ve got some files you might want to see.”

Autumn looked over the USB stick. It was pretty basic, the sort that were manufactured in great numbers both here and on Earth, so cheaply that a lot of companies put intro versions of programs on them and handed them out as advertising. “What kind of information, and where did you get it?”

“Most of it’s video about a gang war in Chicago, but there are also a number of files out of Schirrasburg. Apparently someone’s been able to access some subchannels and get information out of there.”

Autumn noted that Brenda had answered only half of her question. “If you need to protect your source, I won’t pry any further. But you might want to talk to that person, because if I do end up running a story on any of this, being able to identify sources will give it extra credibility.”

“Understood. But this stuff looks hot enough that I thought you ought to take a look at it before I showed it to anyone else.”

Autumn accepted the USB drive. “I’ll take a look at it. I trust that this is not your only copy.”

“Don’t worry. I did learn data management procedure. The first thing I did was back up everything on the computer I was going to use to look at it. Then I copied it onto that machine and then onto a fresh USB stick. At least those are easy enough to get, unlike actual computers. So yes, you can keep this copy.”