Category: Narrative

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Narrative

Reminiscences of A Less than Pleasant Time

Spruance Del Curtin had waited until he was almost finished with supper before texting Zack. The last thing Sprue needed right now was to look desperate for the information.

He’d been a little disappointed to be directed to one of the less desirable residential module lounges, but he had a good idea why Zack would pick this barren place. Given that they were going to be talking about sensitive subjects, they didn’t need a whole bunch of other people hanging around to listen in on what they were saying.

So here he was, waiting in an empty room, trying not to be too obvious about watching the module airlock, just in case someone were to emerge from their apartment and wonder why he was hanging out there. In any case, he had things he was really supposed to be doing, like going over the lesson plans for the class he was supposed to be teaching tomorrow.

He’d no more than begun to engage with the material when the inner hatch of the airlock slid open and out stepped Zack. “Hope I didn’t catch you at a bad time.”

“No problem at all.” Sprue closed his laptop and stuffed it back in his bag. “Just wanted to make good use of the time, considering how everyone’s always on us not to waste our time.”

“Yup.” Zack glanced around the chamber. “Let’s go back to my apartment. Roomie’s on the night shift, so he won’t be back until both of us are going to need to be in bed.”

They retreated down one of the branching corridors to a room not that much different from any other bachelor(ette) apartment around this place. When Shepardsport was originally founded, nobody had ever imagined it would be used as a place of exile for the unwelcome astronaut clones, so these apartments were supposed to be single-occupancy. With the sudden increase in population from the Expulsions, unmarried personnel had been required to double up “for the duration.”

The necessary retrofits had been minimalist at best. Add attachment points for rigging a second bed, then slip in a second set of furniture. It made the already cozy single-occupancy apartments downright crowded, but given the difficulties inherent in creating more residential-rated pressurized volume, the necessary expansion to alleviate the crowding would take time.

At least Zack did have two sling-back chairs that needed only be pulled out of their cubbyhole and unfolded, so they could sit and talk. A few pleasantries about each other’s jobs and studies, and then they got down to the nitty-gritty.

“So you’re looking for some information about how the Sharp Wars started.”

“Right. A friend of mine’s taking Constitution class right now, and a few days ago her teacher got into some of the philosophical stuff behind the Constitution, and was talking about various wars and crises, except he was kind of tiptoeing around the Sharp Wars.”

“Colonel Hearne’s teaching Constitution right now, if I remember correctly. He’s Air Force, and the stuff that really sparked everything involved the Navy. But Hearne’s been an astronaut since before the Energy Wars–“

Realizing this was wandering off into the weeds, Sprue interjected, “I don’t think it’s about interservice rivalries. From what she said, I think it’s something about not saying anything too critical of the Commander-in-Chief.”

“Ah, that.” Zack moistened his lips. “I was still young enough at the time that most of my information was coming from news media. But I’ve heard that Flannigan did not want Bradbury in charge of the Pacific Fleet, and there was some suspicion that he was trying to sabotage the man. Apparently the two of them had history that went back to the Energy Wars, maybe beyond. I do know that Flannigan was in the Marines, and he was injured at Second Nile.”

“Yeah, everybody knows that.”

“But what he tries to keep quiet is that it wasn’t a legitimate combat injury. He broke his leg falling down a ladder on the Ticondaroga, and rumor has it he was drunk on illegal hooch at the time.”

Sprue sucked in a sharp whistle. He knew that Conrad Bradbury had been commanding officer of the USS Nimitz during a good bit of the Energy Wars, including the Second Battle of the Nile. But even the captain of an admiral’s flagship had authority over only his own vessel, and even the air wing embarked had its own commanding officer.

But the flag captain was often quite close to the admiral — he wouldn’t stay flag captain long if they didn’t get along — so it would be possible that he’d accompanied the admiral for some kind of inspection on the Ticondaroga and had uncovered evidence of the truth about then-lieutenant Flannigan’s injury.

Except there was one big problem. “But if Flannigan was so adamantly against Bradbury, why did he put the assignment through? I thought the President had the final say as Commander-in-Chief.”

“In theory, but in practice there’s a lot of political consideration. From some things I’ve heard, Flannigan needed some legislation pushed through, and some Senator was an old wartime buddy of Bradbury’s and wanted him to get the Pacific Fleet command as his final post before retirement. There’s also the story that it was some kind of horse-trading within the Department of Defense, and Flannigan had to acquiesce to Bradbury’s assignment to get something he wanted more. In any case, he wasn’t overly happy about it, and wasn’t going to do any more than he had to on Bradbury’s behalf.”

“Which was stupid, especially considering that command would include forces that would be involved in any new Korean conflict. And with the Kim wackjobs getting wackier with every generation, that place was already a real powderkeg.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Flannigan’s got a vindictive streak as wide as his back, so it was just almost believable that he would’ve set things up so that Sandoval could get into a secure area, in spite of being known to have severe PTSD, and then make sure he just happened to be shot instead of captured alive after everything went off. All we know is that there were a lot of things going on in Pearl Harbor during the memorial service and transfer of command, and we’ll probably never learn the whole story.”

“But it’s probably nasty, and it’s likely that some version of it has been going around on the military grapevine ever since. So Colonel Hearne probably knows a lot more than he can say in any sort of official capacity, even if it’s just instructor for Constitution class.”

Zack leaned forward, spoke in a low voice. “If you want to take the risk, I’ve got a friend down in IT who could probably get you some interesting files off the darknet.”

Sprue had heard about the darknet, the system of servers that couldn’t be found by ordinary searches, but could be located by a person with a specialized browser and some specialized know-how. “I don’t think my friend wants to go that deep. Especially since she’s a minor and I don’t think her guardian would approve.”

Make that definite, considering her foster mother is head of Safety and Security, and was an FBI officer for years before that.

“OK. I hope what I could get you was helpful. Let me know if your friend still has any questions.”

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Narrative

The Ice Grows Ever Thinner

News from home was getting increasingly more scarce, and Bill Hearne didn’t like it. Even all his work up here couldn’t keep his mind sufficiently busy to fend off his concerns about Fred and the rest of the family dirtside.

All the same, he didn’t want to deluge them with e-mails. If things were getting worse, all that would accomplish would be to increase their own anxiety levels.

And that assumed the e-mails would even go through. From some things he was hearing through the pilots’ grapevine, it sounded like even the backbone providers were starting to have trouble keeping their facilities running.

He had just gotten back to the apartment for the evening and was mulling over the question of whether to e-mail Frank when the door opened and in walked Alice. She was looking tired, although he wasn’t aware of any new problems down at Food and Nutrition.

Before he could ask her how her day had gone, she took the chair beside him and started working on his knotted shoulder muscles. “How are things going?”

“Average.” No, he didn’t want to talk about the autolathe that had broken down, or the problems they were having with the guidance on one of the older landers. There was a thin line between decompressing and going on a tear, especially when you were frustrated by an intractable problem.

“In other words, the usual supply of crap that comes with that line of work.” Alice paused for a moment, suggesting she was speaking from experience. “But it’s not work that’s really bothering you.” She looked at the laptop in front of him, the e-mail application opened on it. “I know, it’s hard not to worry about the people we left back on Earth. I try to tell myself that they’ve got their own worries and they’re probably spending most of their time and energy trying to keep things going.”

She didn’t exactly let the words trail off, but her tone suggested she was leaving the matter open-ended, even uncertain whether she wanted to put her thoughts into words. Of course she was getting all the USDA farm reports, so she’d have a lot better idea of just how bad things were getting on the agricultural front down there, quite possibly more information than either of their families still on the farm.

Might as well open the subject. “So how bad are the big brains in Washington saying the farm situation is?”

“Not good. There’s a lot of places that aren’t even reporting, which bothers me almost more than the ones they do have data on. Is it just communications breaking down, so field agents and farmers aren’t able to get the information in, or are we actually losing these people? Or at least enough of them that the ones who are left are too busy keeping things running to deal with reports.”

“Know about that kind of situation.” Bill didn’t like thinking back to those first few months after the Expulsions started in earnest, especially after the destruction of the old Luna Station and the Kitty Hawk Massacre. There were a lot of reports that got a lick and a promise, or just plain didn’t get done at all — and Flight Ops was still paying the price for the loss of data.

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Narrative

The Time We Lose to Meetings

One of the things Ursula Doorne really liked about her peculiar status was how it got her out of a lot of the administrative foofaw that plagued academic departments. With her background in electrical engineering, she was far too valuable dealing with equipment that needed repaired to have her serving on this or that committee, sitting through meetings, filling out documents, and the like.

Except there were always some meetings that one simply couldn’t duck out of, no matter how valuable one was in other areas. Like today, when the head of Science had ordered her to deliver a report on the peculiar behavior of the Sun.

Which meant that she had to pull together all the figures on almost no notice, when she still had very incomplete data. But from the sound of Dr. Iwe’s request, someone higher up wanted to see answers.

Which raised the question of just who was doing the asking. From everything she’d heard, including what Tanner had told her, she was under the impression that NASA was operating on a skeleton crew, just enough to keep essential operations going.

But any anomalies in the behavior of the Sun are essential information, she reminded herself as she completed the last slide for her A/V presentation. Of course NASA is going to want to know about it.

The door to her office opened. Surprised, she looked up at Spruance Del Curtin. “You’re early today.”

“Thought I’d get an early start on the latest data sets.”

“Right now I don’t have any ready.” She explained about the sudden call to make a presentation at the Science Division committee meeting.

Yes, Sprue actually did look disappointed. Could that cocky young smartass actually be discovering actual pride in work that essential but not showy?

Maybe she ought to bring him under her wing a little more, mentor some of that talent that was so often hidden under that I’m-too-cool-for-this exterior. “However, you can help me with the presentation, and get to see a little more of how science gets done.”

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Narrative

Maybe Some Answers

Spruance Del Curtin had almost given up on helping Cindy Margrave with her question about the beginning of the Flannigan Administration and how it led to the Sharp Wars. It would’ve been easier if he could’ve gone directly to some of the people he knew would have the answers, but he didn’t have the right connections to just walk up and ask.

And then he was heading out of the station offices after his air shift and a familiar voice called his name. He turned to find Zach, one of the guys he’d been teamed with off and on when he was still working in Engineering.

“I hear you’ve been asking around for someone who was old enough to have clear memories of the start of the Sharp Wars.”

“Yeah, I was trying to help a colleague who’s been really curious about why her teacher is sort of avoiding that subject. We’re both thinking it has something to do with military personnel not speaking badly of the Commander-in-Chief, but especially with so much of the stuff you can find online being suspect, I wanted to hear what someone who had actual memories of the time had to say.”

“In that case, I’m not sure how much help I’d be. I mean, I was still in middle school then. A very precocious middle school kid who was already following the news and becoming aware of national and world events, which a couple of my teachers seemed to find threatening for some reason, but still seeing it through a kid’s-eye-view.”

Sprue kept his pose non-chalant. “No problem. But even those recollections may give us something to go on.”

Zach cast a significant glance at the clock. “Right now I’m a little tight on time. But text me this evening and we can work out some time to reminisce.”

Not what he’d hoped for, but it was still better than nothing at all.

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Narrative

Dealing with the Effects

Betty Margrave listened with increasing displeasure to the account of the incident in front of the dining commons entrance. As if things weren’t bad enough already, now she had to deal with some kind of adolescent squabble, with no understanding of why it should even be going on.

When both of her security people had given their accounts of the incident, she looked directly at each of them in turn. “This puts me in something of a pickle. Since I’m married into the Shepard lineage, I have to be very careful to avoid any appearance of favoritism, but equally I don’t want to appear to be excessively harsh simply because of that. It may be best if I handle it as little as possible, and allow someone else to take disciplinary authority. In the meantime, I need both of you to keep a close eye on the situation in case we have another flare-up of whatever’s going on.”

They both promised they would, and she had good reason to expect they’d give a heads-up to the rest of the security team. But as she watched them leave, she realized just what a sour taste the whole thing left in her mouth.

Strictly speaking, nothing about the incident merited a formal investigation. Even trying to treat the Chaffee’s words as a threat would be stretching things, and Betty had a good reason to think that she’d get some strong push-back from the departments he was associated with. Overreacting to a little tough-guy talk would probably be the least of it, like as not accompanied by a little eye-rolling.

Guys go for the direct confrontation, she reminded herself. And often as not it doesn’t even come to blows. They size each other up, talk smack to each other, and then something clicks and one of them backs down. Make a formal Issue out of it, and all you end up doing is disrupting a social process that works, and creating a hell of a lot of resentment.

All the same, it bothered her that she had no idea what had happened to lead to the incident. This sort of thing didn’t come out of nowhere, and she had good reason to believe there was something a lot deeper than she was seeing.

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Narrative

Family Matters

Cather Hargreaves wasn’t sure whether he was glad to be getting home for the evening. On one hand, he was glad that he’d been assigned to the main Safety and Security station here in Grissom City proper, which meant he was able to go home every night. On the other hand, he was all too aware that several other members of the department were stationed out at the Roosa Barracks, monitoring flight operations (such as they were these days), although they lived here in the city. Because of the effort to prevent possible contagion from being brought from the spaceport to the city, they were stuck living in temporary quarters out there, seeing their families only via FaceTime or teleconferencing software.

And how would it benefit anyone if you were to join them, just to lessen your feelings of guilt about their situation?

Those had been Toni’s words when he’d mentioned it to her. And he had to agree that, looking at it from a perspective of efficiency, she was absolutely correct. It was just when you looked at it from a perspective of human social cohesion that he really didn’t like being able to go home every night when some of his people couldn’t.

And it’s more important that you be at your best and able to do your job to the best of your ability.

That too had been a strong argument. Or as Toni was wont to point out, sacrifices aren’t magic and don’t have any supernatural power. But she was a deist, and didn’t view the Creator as the sort of entity to be moved by sacrifices.

As usual, she was already home when he got in. She looked a little weary, but that was hardly surprising when one considered that she was one of the people trying to hold the Internet together while things were falling apart on Earth. Just last night she’d been talking about how many of the really big websites were having momentary outages as one set of servers would drop offline and the routers had to reconnect users to a mirror site somewhere else. Now IT’s big project was trying to make sure everything critical was mirrored up here on the Moon, which meant she was lucky to even get to come home.

When her eyes met his, she pushed the weariness away to look excited for him. “Hi, sweetheart. How did it go, or do I ask?”

“The usual.” Cather hoped he didn’t sound too downhearted. “No major problems, but a heck of a lot of little stuff that sure sounds like people stressing out and not quite having the level of self-control they usually would.’

“Not surprising. We’ve pretty well identified all the critical websites we need to have mirrored up here, in case all their dirtside mirrors go down. Now our biggest problem is figuring out how to expand our server capacity to accommodate that much data. Oh, and I just got an e-mail from one of your clone-brothers over at Shepardsport. Seems he’s trying to track down some rumors about the situation down at Schirrasburg.”

Cather’s guts clenched at the mention. “All I know is that they’ve had someone sick, and they’re worried enough that they stopped all flights in and out until they’re certain it’s not the diablovirus. They should have sufficient supplies to get by for at least another three weeks, although things could get pretty tight by the end of that period.”

“OK.” Toni sounded dubious. “According to what he said, he was hearing two contradictory rumors, one that the guy recovered and the other that he died but someone’s covering it up to prevent panic. And before you tell me about not passing rumors, it looks like he’s involved in trying to quash them with facts, and running short on those. I was just about to see what I could find out when you showed up.”

Cather recalled his wife’s skills as a hacker, that she’d gotten into some measure of trouble when she was younger and not so careful. Of course now she had a lot broader authorization as one of the senior members of Grissom City’s IT team, but there still were limits.

“If you’re going to take a look around, be careful. Not just because of health privacy laws, but because if they’re trying to keep a lid on something serious, they’re going to take information security as seriously as physical and biological security. And considering my own position, they could very well take it as an official action on the part of Grissom City.”

“Got it. Now that you’re home, let’s have supper first.”

“Sounds good. I think there’s some leftover chicken from last night that I can turn into something.”

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Narrative

A Helping Hand

Still annoyed that he should have to deal with such stupid antics from any of that brat-pack of teenage Sheps who’d grown a little feral since arriving as middle-graders, Lou walked alone to the dining commons for supper. Brenda needed to pick up her kids anyway, so it was a perfect excuse to say good-bye instead of walking with her.

However, the question that had originally brought them to sitting side-by-side at a computer in IT was still nagging at Lou’s mind. What exactly was going on at Schirrasburg?

It was probably the smallest of the major American settlements. For various reasons it had never really grown at the rate of Grissom City and Coopersville, and had remained more like a very large scientific outpost than a true city on the Moon. Yes, dependents were allowed to live there, but these days some of the larger commercial mining settlements were allowing the miners to bring their families, so the distinction was really blurring.

Which made it all the more surprising that Schirrasburg should be where the supposed lunar Patient Zero should show up. You’d really think it would be Grissom City, which was the big hub of lunar tourism. Before everything closed down, there were thousands of tourists coming and going, wealthy people who were apt to be lax about pre-flight quarantine procedures for the simple reason they were accustomed to their money insulating them from the consequences of their actions. If anyone was going to bring a bug up here, it was likely to be them.

But no one would go out to Schirrasburg for fun. From everything Lou had heard, the place was boring, boring, boring. All scientific and technical people, all with jobs to do and damned little time left for entertainment. The sort of people who went there took procedures seriously or they didn’t get selected.

Unless it was one of the pilot-astronauts. Things might be tamer than the wild and wooly days of the Mercury Seven, but military pilots were always a cocky and headstrong bunch. As Gordon Cooper was reputed to say, the meek might inherit the Earth, but they would not inherit the sky.

If that were the case, it would certainly explain why NASA was working so hard to keep things quiet. No matter how hard they tried to isolate the pilots from each other and from the settlements they visited, there was always a certain amount of interaction. And no one could afford the mess that would result if every pilot had to be grounded who’d had contact with an infected pilot for the previous ten days, let alone the twenty-five that some were saying was the largest possible window of contagion.

However, Lou doubted that Drew Reinholt would be satisfied with a mere hypothesis like that. No doubt he’d considered it himself, and probably avoided airing it in order to make sure he didn’t lead them down a garden path and make them less likely to consider other possibilities.

Except what other possibilities can we explore? I’m pretty well at the end of my skills, and who else is there to turn to?

Which was when he realized that he’d completely ignored his best resource. One of his clone-brothers was married to a top-notch programmer with a rep as a white-hat hacker. Better send a message off to her, see if she could help.

By the time Lou finished, he was at the landing in front of the dining commons. And gathered around the big double doors was a whole crowd of teenage Sheps. No, they didn’t look like they were hanging around to hit on girls.

Which meant that word had already gotten around, and they were looking for trouble. On the other hand, this was a very public place. How far would they push matters with so many people watching?

Lou squared his shoulders and kept walking as if he owned the place. “OK, guys, are you going to let me through, or am I going to have to Batman my way in?”

For a moment he wondered if the Sheps were going to respond with derision. But then they began to pull back. He decided he didn’t want to know whether it was the knowledge that he shared his ur-brother’s interest in boxing, or the two Security guys behind him, whose reflections were showing in the etched moonglass of the doors.

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Narrative

An Obstacle

Sometimes two heads really were better than one. In spite of all her efforts, Brenda Redmond had been getting nowhere with Drew’s request to find out something about the situation in Schirrasburg, even after he’d followed up. Much as she hated to tell him she had hit a wall, she was coming to realize that she was avoiding texting him because she didn’t want to have to admit it. And there was no way to have a conversation without the subject coming up, and once it did, no way to talk around the issue without it being obvious that she was dodging it.

And then Lou had seen her slipping into the newsroom to check their computers while everyone else was away. There’d been no way to evade the question without being rude, and the DJ’s were supposed to be a team.

So here she was down in IT with Lou, doing some searches on web traffic. It wasn’t exactly hacking, but it was just enough of a gray area she was surprised he’d be delving into it. So far most of what they were seeing was routine stuff, completely unremarkable data transfers. A lot of personal e-mail and texts going back and forth, a lot of web searches, all private stuff that they couldn’t look at, but strongly suggesting a community of people confined to quarters when not working on survival-essential activities, trying to distract themselves from their worries.

However, there did seem to be a fair amount of traffic on some official channels. Given the sudden spike in the data, it looked like they were probably sending files back and forth.

“Which could mean any of a number of things,” Lou averred. “We can only see what’s changing, not what’s in in the files that are going back and forth.”

“But there’s definitely something going on. And you’re pretty sure it started about the same time as the rumors about someone with the diablovirus at Schirrasburg.”

“Roughly. It’s hard to pin a date on the basis of a rumor, but I think we can be confident that things are most definitely not normal at Schirrasburg. However, it’s still not enough information to say for definite whether it involves a patient with the diablovirus, let alone whether any such individual has recovered or died from it.”

Lou was about to say more when a youthful voice called out, “Oooh-la-la.”

Brenda looked up just as a teenage Shep walked in, lips curled upward in a grin of amusement. As she realized what he was assuming, her cheeks grew warm.

However, Lou’s expression showed no embarrassment, only anger. He leaped out of his chair and across the distance, grabbing the young Shep by the shirt and slamming him up against the wall. “You’d better watch your mouth, buddy.”

The Shep squirmed in a desperate struggle to break Lou’s hold. Once the kid got his full growth, he’d tower over a Chaffee, but Sheps were always smaller than normal when they were younger. Drew had talked about being one of the shortest kids in his class all the way until he got into high school and finally got those last couple of growth spurts. Even then, he didn’t fill out until he was in his mid-twenties, never mind doing a regular astronaut workout every day after he got shipped up here.

The kid was babbling something about not meaning any harm, and it just being a joke. However, Lou wasn’t having any of it.

“You know as well as I do that Brenda’s dad is a Grissom. That makes her family, so you’d better not be going around insinuating that she and I are doing something disgusting together. Or do you want me to get him involved, especially considering you work in Engineering too?”

Now the kid knew he’d gotten in way over his head. He was fighting the urge to blubber in fear, but his eyes were still wide enough the whites were showing top and bottom, more than even a Shep’s naturally buggy eyes.

Another man might’ve humiliated him, made him beg and plead to be set free. But Lou just let him go and pointed toward the corridor leading back out. “Now get out of here. And don’t let me find out you’ve been going around blabbing.”

The kid just nodded, then fled. Lou brushed his hands off, then returned to the computer. “Now that’s settled, let’s get back to work.”

Let’s just hope it really is settled. Brenda knew how hyper-competitive Sheps could be, and how vindictive. She really didn’t want to see this incident rebounding back on Lou, especially when he was just trying to help her answer a question.

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Narrative

Unnerving Developments

Autumn Belfontaine hadn’t really known what to think when Steffi Roderick had called and requested for her to come down to IT as soon as possible. Autumn had been in the middle of preparing afternoon and evening drive time newscasts, and while there was no huge time pressure, she liked to do them in one sitting for better cohesiveness.

But one of the critical skills of a journalist was the ability to be flexible. Breaking news didn’t follow anybody’s schedule, and from the sound of Steffi’s voice, whatever had just happened was both urgent and worrisome.

Now she was waiting while Steffi finished talking with several of her immediate subordinates. From the sound of it, they were talking about fallback options, but exactly what she could not determine.

Finally they wound up their conference and the three of them came filing out. As soon as Steffi came out, she looked directly at Autumn. “Glad you were able to come down so quickly. Come inside so we can talk.”

“As urgent as you sounded, I thought I’d better not delay.”

“It looks like things may be changing rapidly. Right before I called you, I was in a conference call with the IT chiefs of all the major lunar settlements, verifying what we were observing and determining our best strategies for dealing with it.”

“So we’re looking at a major change in our situation?”

“Actually, Earth’s. We’ve been picking up cascades of micro-outages in a number of major websites. E-commerce and social media in particular, but also some major news websites. We think what we are seeing is the Internet shifting to mirror sites in other locations when they lose connectivity to their primary server farms.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” Autumn recalled her old friend who was struggling to keep a radio station on the air, and what little she’d been able to offer him in the way of suggestions. “Especially if they’re losing power. Those places are supposed to have backup generators.”

“Which have finite amounts of fuel, and if they’re not getting replenished, they’ll soon be offline. We’re not seeing as bad of problems as we might, mostly because the most popular websites all are mirrored on servers up here to eliminate light-speed lag. We’re talking about finding ways to duplicate as much functionality as we can manage, but some of it is going to be tricky. We’re talking to legal teams, making sure we don’t violate copyrights in the process, but it’s really concerning that we might suddenly lose critical parts of our information infrastructure. In fact, right after we get done here, I’m going to Engineering and Medlab and making sure that they have all their essential manuals and other documents on local servers.”

“I don’t blame you at all. I’ll work on finding other ways of keeping in contact with my stringers down on Earth, so I can still get news even if all the major news websites and wire services go down.”

“Good. At least we’re used to jerry-rigging our way through things, so this should be just another challenge.”

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Narrative

Slow and Steady

One good thing about having worked in Engineering was plenty of connections with the older clones, the ones who remembered the early days of the Flannigan Administration. Although some of them had been born from artificial uterine environments and raised in the creches, a fair number of them had been raised in regular families and as a result would have a wide variety of experiences of those days.

However, now that he was no longer working in Engineering, he had a lot less contact with those guys. That made it a lot harder to make contact with them. He couldn’t very well walk up to them and ask them what they remembered about the early Flannigan Administration and the beginning of the Sharp Wars, and there just weren’t the opportunities to have a conversation start up naturally that could be steered in the appropriate direction.

Still, difficult was not the same as impossible. He did still have enough in common with those guys that he could find ways to get together with them and strike up a conversation. It just took a lot more work.

Which was why he really didn’t want to have to see Cindy Margrave right now. He really didn’t want to admit that he’d made little or no progress on finding out what she wanted to know.

Which made him very relieved when he arrived at the station offices and found no one at the receptionist’s desk. Sometimes Cindy did stay a little late, especially if she needed to wind something up.

But he had to come early if he wanted to talk with Autumn Belfontaine about the possibility of doing work with the news department and still be a DJ. Once his air shift started, he didn’t want to get involved in a conversation that could take him away from the DJ booth too long.

Except when he got to the newsroom, Autumn was nowhere in sight. One of the younger reporters looked up from a computer and said she’d been called down to IT for something.

Nothing to do but thank the kid for the information and find something to busy himself until time for his air shift. He certainly had some studying to do.