Category: Narrative

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Narrative

The Moment Everything Changed

Spruance Del Curtin had just signed off, getting everything ready for the Tea Time crew to come in, when the door opened and in walked Autumn Belfontaine, a very strange look on her face. He recalled having seen her in her office earlier, hunched over her laptop with that same fixed expression.

No, better not even bother with normal polite greetings. Just hand her the headphones and get out of the way.

The “On Air” light was already illuminated by the time he got out the door. He could only hope that the mic hadn’t picked up the click of the latch.

From the front office he could already hear Autumn’s voice over the stereo behind the receptionist’s desk. Cindy had already taken off for the evening, so Sprue decided to sit down and listen. He had plenty of time to get to the dining commons for supper and still get some studying done before he needed to be to bed. Especially with Dr. Doorne annoyed with him, he’d better be able to put in a good showing next session.

But now he was listening to Autumn reading off the URLs of one after another television station’s local news website, detailing reports of illnesses and deaths that should’ve been making the national news, even world news — but weren’t. Then she told everyone how to get to the Shepardsport Pirate Radio website to post their own accounts of what was going on in their communities.

It was a risk — if someone in the Flannigan Administration was determined to silence this outbreak, they could flood their comments page with so much spam there wouldn’t be time for the whole news team to wade through it. Maybe Lou’s sister-in-law over at Grissom City who was such a hotshot programmer might be able to write an intelligent agent to sift through it, but Sprue wasn’t going to count on it.

And then Autumn was reading a set of announcements. Not just the usual things about washing hands and covering coughs that they’d been doing for the last several days. This stuff was serious, particularly the restrictions on the pilots. All deliveries to outlying settlements were to be dropped off at the pad, and the inhabitants were to retrieve everything by loaderbot. No one was to visit the shirtsleeve habitats, and no one was to stay overnight, not at the outlying habitats, and not at any of the big settlements or Luna Station.

And he knew several women around this place who were not going to be happy about the next restriction: all pilots flying in from other settlements were to remain in the port facilities, and as much as possible should avoid interacting with local staff. And here Drew Reinholt had just managed to snag assignments flying here again. Working with Brenda was not going to be fun a-tall.

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Narrative

Of Abandoned Vehicles and Empty Tents

Reggie arrived at the newsroom to find Autumn Belfontaine hunched over her laptop, watching a video. Although he couldn’t get a good view from his angle, it looked like it was playing on a local news station website. A female reporter in a windbreaker was talking to the camera in front of a tow truck hooking up to what looked like an old RV. Too bad Autumn was keeping the volume low enough that he couldn’t make out what the woman was saying.

However, it also meant that it was low enough that Autumn could hear his approach. She paused the video and stood up to face him. “Hi, Reggie. Is there something I need to go live with?”

“Not at the moment, but I think we’d better have a talk.” He glanced over to his wife, who’d paused to talk to one of the engineering staff. “Steffi, could you tell Autumn what you found out today?”

As Steffi explained about the e-mail, Autumn’s eyes widened. “So it’s not just the homeless population.” She gestured toward the frozen video on her laptop. “I’ve been visiting local TV and radio station websites from all over the country, and about half of them are reporting a sudden spike of illness in homeless camps. This one’s a human-interest story about a homeless vet, I think they said he fought in the Energy Wars, who’d been living in an old RV under an Interstate overpass in the Chicago area. They’re trying to locate next of kin to claim his remains and the possessions inside his vehicle, including his medals and citations.”

Reggie had his own memories of the Energy Wars, although he’d been a fighter pilot flying off aircraft carriers, not a ground-pounder. “Damn. Make it definite, someone is suppressing this news. I can still remember when I was fifteen and we had the big flu outbreak, the one they always blamed on the chaos after the fall of the Soviet Union. That was back when it was just the three networks, but they started running reports when the first big groups of cases showed up, and it wasn’t even all that deadly.”

“Then you want me to run this?”

“Write up a report and run it past me first. We may need to tweak the emphasis a little, but we definitely have to get it out that we’re looking at a very big picture. Big enough that I need to talk with Dr. Thuc about what precautions we need to start taking now.”

Autumn looked back to her laptop. “Then you think it could get up here?”

“We can’t discount the possibility. The Martian settlements should be safe, but it’s a three-day journey from Earth to the Moon. All it would take would be one person breaking the pre-flight quarantine.”

Yes, Autumn realized just what it would mean. Because pressurized volume was such a valuable commodity, people in lunar settlements lived in the sort of close quarters that were usually associated with extreme poverty on Earth, outside seagoing vessels and offshore drilling platforms. Worse, the life support systems would circulate a virus through the entire settlement, infecting everyone.

“I’ll get right on it.”

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Narrative

The Widening Shadow

Reggie Waite didn’t usually go down to IT to talk with his wife. As commandant of the settlement, he needed to avoid any appearances of favoritism. However, given the tenor of Steffi’s text, he’d decided that it wasn’t worth the stress to have her come up to his office.

Shepardsport’s IT department was located in the lowest levels of the settlement’s habitats, where they could use the Moon itself as a heatsink for cooling their fastest and most powerful number-crunchers. Here and then he passed doors opening onto rooms filled with racks of servers — but even these were run of the mill machines, busy with routine data applications, ranging from render farms to e-mail store and forward for the local Internet nodes. The real heavy iron was kept in secure rooms, well past the help-desk offices and data-center equipment.

Reggie found Steffi in her office, her face a mask of calm he knew at once to be false. When she greeted him at the door, her professional face stayed firmly in place, division head to commandant. Only when she closed the door did she let it slip.

“Thanks for coming down here, Reggie.” Her voice had that breathless sound of someone under severe emotional strain.

“What’s wrong, Steffi?”

“I just got an e-mail from an old friend at JPL. Things are getting really bad down in the LA Basin. Apparently that sickness that’s going around showed up in several different nursing homes all at once. They think it was a doctor who’d just flown back from some kind of professional conference and visited patients at all of them. But there are two nursing homes that he never visited, so there’s some speculation that some part-time workers carried it back and forth.”

Reggie recalled a recent e-mail from his father, mentioning having to reschedule an appointment because of illness at the client’s facility. “That’s not good.”

“No, it’s not.” Steffi moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “Right now they’re especially worried because a couple people at the Lab have family that work at those nursing homes. Siblings for the most part, a couple of parents who were looking for part-time work after they retired. Not someone they see every day, but close enough to visit on the weekends. Although one of the senior scientists had a daughter in high school who’d been volunteering at the one that got hit worst.”

Reggie considered what to say. It had been over two decades since he was working with JPL on the Dis Pater project, and he had no idea who some of these people were. However, it was possible that Steffi knew them, so he didn’t want to come across as overly clinical and insensitive. “Do they think she’s caught whatever this thing is?”

“Not yet, although with JPL’s flexibility about telecommuting, they’re apparently telling him he’s free to work from home if there’s any question of putting the girl under quarantine. And they’ve told all the janitors and support staff that they are not to try to be heroes and drag themselves in if they feel sick. They’re to call in sick, and the Lab will make sure that they’re covered if they run out of sick days.”

She looked Reggie straight in the eyes. “This thing is serious. Which makes me wonder why we’re not hearing a lot more of it from the Earthside news media. Some blogs here and there, but none of the major networks, not in the US, and not abroad.”

“I think the two of us need to have a serious talk with Autumn Belfontaine. I’d been counseling caution, but I’m starting to wonder if we’re looking at a coverup.”

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Narrative

Whispers and Rumors

Cindy Margrave knew she shouldn’t listen in on other people’s conversations. However, Sprue and Quinn weren’t exactly making it easy to avoid doing so. They might be keeping their voices low, but they had managed to be just loud enough to be right there at the threshold of her awareness, neither so soft she couldn’t hear, nor so loud that she could hear clearly enough to put their conversation in the background. No, it was right at that volume where it drew attention no matter how hard you tried to ignore it.

Something about trouble back on Earth, and not just President Flannigan beating the drum of moral panic. She was far too familiar with that, ever since she and her sister Kitty had gotten swept up in the Expulsions just because Aunt Betty took them in.

No, this sounded like some kind of slow-motion disaster. People sick and dying in widely separated places, the authorities struggling to trace the connections between them.

Had it been only a few days ago when Autumn Belfontaine had hurried into the DJ booth to announce the breaking news about a cruise ship that had been stricken with illness and rescued by the US Navy? If there was a lot more things like it happening, why wasn’t she reporting on them?

It would’ve been so much easier if Cindy could just ask someone. But that would require admitting that she’d been guilty of listening in on a conversation to which she was not a party, even if she hadn’t meant to.

What was the saying? Keep your eyes and ears open and your mouth shut.

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Narrative

Of Linear and Geometric Growth

Even after all this time up here on the Moon, Spruance Del Curtin still found it difficult to get used to the idea that most of his instructors were not teachers in the way the ones back in Houston had been. Instead, they were people who happened to have sufficient background in a subject to teach it at the relevant level, whether or not they had any formal training in teaching.

Which was how he had a radio astronomer teaching his statistics class. Not that Dr. Doorne was a bad teacher — she certainly knew her stats, and was introducing the to professional-grade stats packages and real data — but it was sure clear that astronomy was the woman’s real interest. All it took to get the class off on a tangent was to have someone bring up one of her particular interests, especially the ones that had to do with signal processing.

He’d done it himself, a couple of times when the station was having weird difficulties that neither Engineering nor IT could hash out. As soon as he’d laid out the problem, that woman just ran with it, and damn if she wasn’t cute when she had a problem that captivated her. People talked about someone’s eyes lighting up when they got an idea, but her whole face took on this glow of excitement.

Today wasn’t going to be one of those days. She’d brought in a bunch of data sets from the rodent labs, passed out the USB sticks and told everyone to copy the data onto their laptops and proceeded to talk about exponential growth curves.

Sprue knew the theory — start with a single pair of mice and watch the population explode in a a few generations. Of course in the wild you never got anything like that except on isolated islands where they had no natural predators. But in the artificial environment of a laboratory, with complete safety and effectively limitless food, they could just keep breeding, and breeding, and breeding. And the data in front of him was bearing that out.

“However, it’s also important to remember that it is very difficult to distinguish between an exponential growth curve and the early parts of an S-curve without further data. Eventually, some forms of growth will reach a limit and level off.” Dr. Doorne looked around the room. “A population of rapidly reproducing animals will eventually reach the limits of even the most generous habitat, even if it is only because the researchers operating the laboratory take measures to limit their growth. What other forms of growth will start by looking like an exponential curve, and then level off into an S-curve?”

Trust a Chaffee to always be the first one with his hand up. Sprue still remembered taking intro to geology with one. The kid was practically the teacher’s pet within the first week of class.

“How about pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes. Eventually they run out of suckers, for the simple reason that the human population was finite.”

Sprue was a bit taken aback. Usually that geneset was such a bunch of goody-two-shoes that you’d think they didn’t even know the concept of confidence games.

However, Dr. Doorne seemed to find it utterly unremarkable. “Who else can provide an example?”

This time Sprue made sure he got her nod. “The expansion of a virgin-field epidemic.”

Dr. Doorne’s eyes went wide. “Where did you hear about that?”

Sprue held his ground in the face of the implication that he had overstepped a boundary. “I do work at the radio station. A lot of stuff goes past the news desk.”

“That’s enough.” Dr. Doorne’s voice went hard, a tone Sprue had never heard her use. “Now, let’s turn our attention to the data sets in folder two.”

Make it definite, she knew something that wasn’t for general circulation, and did not like discovering that he was aware of it. Now the big question was whether she’d go complaining to Captain Waite too. Sprue didn’t think the big boss would be so easy-going a second time.

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Narrative

Lightning Flashes Across the Sky

Quinn Merton got down to Innsmouth Sector and the spaceport facilities to find his elder clone-brother already waiting for him. At least Rick Sutton didn’t open the conversation with, “What took you so long?” Like as not he had a good idea of the reason why: someone bringing a big piece of equipment through an airlock between modules, such that all traffic had to wait until it was through.

Instead, Rick cast a quick look around him. “Let’s go down to one of the conference rooms to talk about this.”

Make that definite about this being something to keep quiet. Although as a pilot-astronaut stationed down in Coopersville, Rick didn’t have an office up here, he did have access to any of several small rooms where pilots could confer in private, either with other pilots or with non-pilot staff here in Shepardsport. They might not be completely soundproofed, but they were sufficiently enclosed that casual passers-by would not overhear.

Once they were inside and the door closed, Rick went straight to business. No preliminary small talk, just a stern, “Now this is not for public dissemination, but I think you deserve to know this now.”

“Understood.”

“You do know I have a cousin who lives out in the LA Basin and works as a paramedic.”

Even as Quinn answered in the affirmative, he considered what it must be like to grow up in a real family. Even if Rick knew he was adopted from when he was a little kid, it would still be so much different from growing up in the creche.

Rick’s expression grew solemn. “I just got an e-mail from him. Yesterday they went out to a welfare check, some guy living in an old van in an alley. Apparently they found him dead, and from the looks of the mess in there, he’d been pretty sick before the end. From what he’s been hearing online in some private groups for first responders, stuff like this is happening in a lot of places.”

Quinn considered it, recalled some of Autumn Belfontaine’s low-voiced phone conversations. “Then why isn’t it getting into the media?”

Was that a hint of an ironic smile. “That was what I was going to ask you, considering that you’re part of the media yourself.”

“I’m just a DJ, and I only have one air shift a week anyway. It might be different if I were working in the news department, but the only time I handle news is when I have to read solar storm warnings.”

Quinn paused, considering how much he wanted to tell his elder clone-brother. Finally, he decided to give Rick an abbreviated and rather general account of the news director’s comings and goings. “I think she knows something is going on, but for one or another reason she’s just monitoring things, not reporting on them, and not letting any of the junior reporters either. That’s why I e-mailed you earlier, hoping that maybe you’d know something.”

“Which was probably the best course of action you could’ve taken. Especially given the current political situation, she may want to avoid saying anything until she has a definite handle on just what is going on.”

“Understood.” Quinn considered how many times Shepardsport Pirate Radio had broken news that the Flannigan Administration was trying to keep secret, or had countered their distortions and outright falsehoods. A single rash statement could blow that carefully built good reputation.

“In the meantime, take care. If you need to get something to me quickly, just keep it discreet.”

Quinn promised he would. The walk back up to his quarters felt very lonely.

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Narrative

An Unexpected Summons

Homework and lesson plans finished, Quinn Merton was going through his fan mail. Not that he got a great deal of it, but as DJ of the Full Moon Barn Dance every Saturday evening, he got a decent amount.

Most of it was more on the line of requests than girls going all cow-eyed over him. Which meant it was a good idea to keep up with them so he could have his playlist lined up well before the week’s show.

His phone dinged — incoming text. He looked over to see a message from Rick Sutton. “Can you come down to the spaceport? I have something I’d like to talk to you about.”

Quinn considered the implications. Whatever, it was, it had to be important — and something sensitive enough that his elder clone-brother didn’t want to discuss it over the telephone network.

Did it have to do with that cruise ship and all of Autumn Belfontaine’s mysterious phone calls and trips down to Medlab? If it did, Major Sutton would have plenty of reason to prefer discretion, especially after the way Spruance Del Curtin got called up to the commandant’s office after he’d been trying to sound out people he thought might know something.

And if it wasn’t, it was probably going to be something else that shouldn’t be noised about. Just text back a quick I’m coming and get down there.

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Narrative

Hello Goodbye

The worst part about having a commuter marriage isn’t the times you spend apart. It’s when you finally get to see each other, and then you had to say good-bye again.

Brenda Redmond drew herself a cup of coffee from the coffeemaker in the music library, which doubled as a meeting room and staff lounge. At least these days you could get actual coffee up here, thanks to the expansion of the greenhouse farms to produce a wider variety of agricultural products.

Drew had flown in last night, right after supper, and by the time he’d gotten through with all the paperwork, it was almost time for bed. They’d hardly had time to talk before they both started nodding off to sleep, and the next thing Brenda knew, the alarm was going off to get her down here in time for her air shift.

By the time she’d be off the air, Drew would already be back down to the spaceport facilities, overseeing the loading of his lander with cargo to take back to Grissom City. Nothing to do but give him a quick good-bye kiss and hurry off.

And he got this flight only because someone else needed the time off. Then it’s back to his regular run, up to Luna Station and back down again.

Brenda tried to tell herself she should be grateful that at least he wasn’t getting assigned to the Scott, or worse, one of the Aldrin cycler spacecraft going back and forth between the Earth-Moon system and Mars. This way he could pick up flights over here now and then, even if he couldn’t get a regular assignment. Apparently the big bosses preferred having him on the more difficult orbital missions ever since his performance during the malware attack on flights inbound to Slayton Field.

Brenda was still mulling it over when a voice called her name. She looked up to see Cindy standing in the entrance.

“Hi, Cindy. What is it?”

Cindy joined Brenda on the sofa. “Any idea what’s with Sprue?” Her lowered voice suggested this was not a discussion for general consumption.

“What about him?” Although Brenda had a fair idea, especially after her father had taken her aside for a talking-to, she didn’t want to open that conversation only to discover Cindy was asking about something completely innocuous.

“He’d been dropping hints and asking questions for the past several days, and then bang, just like that, he stopped.” Cindy looked Brenda up and down. “I was just wondering if you had any idea what was going on.”

“I have a few ideas, but I’m not sure how much we want to be heard talking about them.” Brenda cast a significant look at the clock. “Right now it’s almost time for my air shift, so I need to be ready to be on.”

“Gotcha.” Cindy retreated back to her desk, leaving Brenda free to get to the DJ booth.

Yes, she’d picked up the hint that it might be possible to discuss matters later. Assuming of course something didn’t happen to knock everything sideways, like Autumn Belfontaine coming in here with breaking news that blew everyone’s speculations right out of orbit.

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Narrative

Heart to Heart

All the way back from Innsmouth Sector, Brenda had been holding herself firmly in check. Much as she wanted to wrap her husband in a tight embrace, she knew that decorum must be observed. Even if he was wearing a NASA flight suit rather than uniform, Drew was still an officer of the US Air Force, which meant that public displays of affection must be kept to a discreet peck on the cheek, maybe a quick kiss on the lips after a long deployment.

And Drew had spent the last month and a half doing runs up to Luna Station. That meant he had to look right down on Shepardsport every time his lander docked to the station. To be able to see your family’s home from orbit must be even harder than having to sit at home waiting — especially since she couldn’t see the station with the naked eye unless she wanted to go up to the observatory, which was actually on the surface. Sure, there were plenty of feeds from Luna Station on the Internet, but avoiding them was easy. Just don’t point your browser anywhere that leads to one of them.

Now they were in the privacy of their apartment, and the children were already put to bed. Brenda had lowered the lights, hardly brighter than the telltales on the life-support monitor by the door. No room down here was ever totally dark, not on a world where every habitable volume had to be artificially maintained. But you could get things dim enough to create that feeling of intimacy that a couple craved.

Especially when you needed to talk about sensitive topics. Like all the weirdness that had been going on for the past several days, the bits of information mentioned in passing or overheard, especially when Autumn Belfontaine was taking calls. Sprue’s carefully oblique questions that suddenly ended after he got called up to the commandant’s office for a conference, at which point he became evasive about all his previous curiosity.

“Something’s going on, and for some reason they’re not even wanting us DJ’s to know about it. Ever since the news about that cruise ship came through, everything’s been tightened down in the news department. It makes me wonder what they’re hiding, and why.”

“Maybe hiding isn’t the best word.” Drew paused, considering his words. “That suggests an intent to deceive, and I don’t think we’re looking at that. And yes, I do know that there’ve been a fair number of developments on Earth that are being soft-pedaled up here. A couple of the guys in our unit have family that are in the health professions, so I hear a fair amount of stuff that’s pretty concerning.”

“OK.” Brenda wasn’t sure how much she wanted to try to draw him out. Although he might not work with secret materials, there were other kinds of things that weren’t for general dissemination. And given her line of work, he might have been specifically counseled by command authority to watch what he told her. “And you’ve probably been getting the same stern warnings we’ve been getting about the danger of spreading rumors, and how we should only follow authoritative sources.”

“In spades.” Drew gave her that dry laugh. “I probably shouldn’t have even been listening to the guys talking around the table at the Roosa Barracks dining commons. But you know how late-night bull sessions are. Stay too aloof, and you’re not a team player. And it’s not like I’ve got flights every morning, so there are a lot of times when I don’t even get that excuse.”

Make that definite — he knows something, and it’s really bothering him, enough that he wants to discuss it, but knows he shouldn’t.

Which meant she shouldn’t push him about it. Better to take the conversation to more pleasant matters — the children, her training and teaching responsibility. If Drew wanted to spill the beans later, he would. Appearing to pry would only alarm him and make him even more closed-mouthed.

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Narrative

A Warning Against Nosiness

Reggie Waite studied his younger clone-brother. “Good afternoon, Sprue. Do you have any idea why I’ve called you in here today?”

Spruance Del Curtin tensed, a subtle movement barely visible through his track suit. “No.”

Yes, there was a subtle hesitation, a drawing out of the negative particle with a little too much emphasis. Subtle cues, but easier to recognize in your own flesh and blood. Sprue wasn’t trying to falsely deny a definite positive. Instead, he was trying to brush away a multitude of possibilities.

“I was expecting that answer.” Reggie kept his voice mild, knowing it would keep Sprue wondering. “No doubt there are so many places you’ve been sailing a lee shore that you’re not sure which one’s the problem.”

Make that definite — Sprue had quite a few things on his mind. Now the question was whether to openly confront him about his pump people for information, or to leave things ambiguous enough that he’d might decide to tighten up on a number of things where he was playing fast and loose.

As Reggie expected, Sprue was far too cagey to blurt anything out. “It seems like someone’s always after me for something. One person’s unhappy that I’m not studying enough to suit them, and another’s complaining that I’m showing people up. It’s pretty hard to know what’s the real problem.”

“In which case, maybe you ought to do some serious thinking about just what you’re doing, and why it bothers people.” Reggie looked straight into his eyes. “Consider this a warning that some people are not pleased with your attitude, and things may go poorly for you if they do not see some change. Dismissed.”

Sprue managed to choke out something shaped like a promise to do better, then left in a little more haste than was appropriate. However, calling on him on a violation of protocol at this point would not be a good idea.

Still, they were going to need to curb his curiosity. That or bring him in on things, which would require being confident he knew when to keep his mouth shut.