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Narrative

The Unwinding

The station was oddly quiet today. Maybe it was the absence of Spruance Del Curtin, who’d gotten pulled off to some other duty and had Quinn Merton taking over his shift for the day.

But Autumn never had any trouble with him. It probably helped that she was the daughter of a Shep herself, and had inherited her father’s long face and lanky build. All the Sheps had taken one look at her and known that she was Off Limits for their antics.

Still, she was noticing his absence far too much as she sat at her desk, trying to work her way through the latest reports from Earth. At least AP and Reuters were still reporting, although she had her doubts about the reliability of some of the stringers. Especially after she’d talked with Dr. Thuc and some of the people up at Gagarinsk, she was very cautious about any reports about analysis or sequencing of the genome of the diablovirus, especially the ones suggesting it might have been artificially manipulated. Without evidence that the person doing the reporting had a strong background in the biological sciences, there was no telling how well they understood what their sources were telling them, or how much they might be letting wishful thinking or fear color their understanding.

Of more concern were the local reports she could still pick up — and the fact that a number of local radio and TV stations had stopped updating their websites altogether. Just how badly were things unraveling down there? Not just in the areas where technological civilization had been primarily an elite phenomenon and people outside the big showplace cities continued to live as their ancestors had from time out of mind, but in places she considered thoroughly modern.

Heck, there were several small-town radio stations in Minnesota that hadn’t updated their websites in over a week. Call signs she recognized from late-night twirling of the radio dial,. that she’d followed for old times’ sake. Some of them even had people she knew personally from broadcast journalism classes at U-Minn.

Would it do any good to try to raise them by e-mail? Most of the station websites did include contact information, at least for their news staff if not for the on-air personalities.

At least then you might be able to get a better sense of just what’s happening on the ground, without the filter of what appearances officialdom wants presented to the rest of the Solar System.

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Narrative

The Children’s Hour

The classroom was a clamor of children’s voices, fairly bouncing off every surface. Once again Spruance Del Curtin wondered how he’d managed to get roped into this particular duty.

He knew all too well why — the kids were supposed to be going to the observatory for a basic science class. And kids this young were going to need more than just one or even two adults to keep them in good order on the trip up and back. So as Dr. Doorne’s special protege, he’d gotten roped into the task — and he sure couldn’t very well refuse, not when he really needed to keep on her good side.

However, the observatory was a geodesic dome of moonglass — one of the few surface features of the settlement to be part of its pressurized volume. With the Sun in such an unsettled state, even the solar filters were rather flimsy protection from radiation, especially for young children who were still growing.

So they were going to have a planetarium lesson instead, in the biggest room the science department had. Except for one big problem — the projector was still somewhere in the Astronomy Department’s storage rooms, thanks to a miscommunication, probably related to the change of plans.

It would’ve been so much easier if the teacher had just sent him up to the departmental offices to retrieve it. He actually knew his way around the Astronomy Department, unlike Ms. Cartwright, who just had some general science background and had been assigned the class because she was good with kids.

So here he was, stuck minding a bunch of little kids who were bored out of their minds. Worse, he’d had to arrange for one of the other guys to cover his air shift, and he was really missing it right now.

Especially considering that he was having to do this job with Rand Littleton. That kid was such an apple-polisher, and everyone favored him because he was a survivor of the ordeal in the downed lander. Never mind that it had been how many years now since the destruction of the old Luna Station, those kids always got cut slack on everything.

And Rand had been “one of the little kids” back then. The biggest reason he’d gotten so much responsibility was that one of the geologists had made him her protege.

And I don’t dare complain too much about it because her husband’s one of my clone-brothers. Sprue still remembered how Doyle had dressed him down. No, he had no desire for a repetition, and just because the pilots were all quarantined down at Flight Ops for now didn’t mean they would be forever.

And we Sheps have long memories.

At least keeping the kids corralled didn’t leave much time for anything else, so he didn’t have to make conversation with Rand. And quite honestly, Rand was a whole lot better with kids than he was. Rand always had that knack for finding ways to amuse little kids.

And here came Ms. Cartwright, projector in hand. At least she had a good idea that Sprue would know how to set it up, so he didn’t have to sit there trying to keep the kids quiet while she fumbled her way through the process.

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Document

The Wind from the Sun

The solar wind is perhaps one of the most poorly understood astronomical phenomena, at least in the general populace. This stream of charged particles from the solar corona spreads out throughout the Solar System, and is believed to extend well beyond the Kuiper Belt. This volume of space is known as the heliosphere.

The point at which the solar wind meets the interstellar medium is known as the heliopause, and is believed to be a region of great turbulence. Because the Sun follows an orbit around the central black hole of the Milky Way galaxy, the heliosphere is not a true sphere, but rather a shape more like a comet. The region of the heliosphere in the direction of the Sun’s orbit is compressed by its collision with the interstellar medium, while the trailing parts of the heliosphere extend like a wake.

Popular misconceptions about the solar wind are heavily influenced by early science fiction, especially space operas in which space is treated like an ocean. Although the solar wind is an important contributor to space weather, it does not drive solar storms such as flares or coronal mass ejections the way atmospheric winds drive hurricanes or mesocyclones on Earth.

—- Rand Littleton, response to essay question on solar wind, Introduction to Astrodynamics.

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Narrative

Beyond the Horizon

Every time Drew closed his eyes, he kept seeing the lunar horizon stretching out before him. Maybe it was just because he didn’t feel so hemmed in when he was flying.

Even back at Slayton Field, the restrictions were getting tighter as the close calls kept accumulating. At first they just hadn’t been allowed to go into the main part of Grissom City, but they were allowed to mix freely with the support staff. Now they were under orders to remain in their quarters when they weren’t actively working on something that took them to a particular place.

And it’s interesting how many people suddenly get a whole lot more interested in simulator time. Half the pilots wouldn’t put in any more than the essential time, and now we’re all practically fighting for our turns on those machines.

Here, it would be much harder to argue for simulator time, or pretty much anything that would get him out of this tiny BOQ cubicle. Sure, they’d set up a place for visitations, but the kids had been more frustrated than happy at seeing Daddy through a thick plate of moonglass, so he and Brenda had agreed that it would be just as well to just visit via FaceTime on their tablets, which they could do no matter where he was.

Which meant there was nothing to do but wait until Brenda called. And in the meantime, he had documentation he really needed to be looking over. Even amidst a pandemic and a solar storm watch, he needed to keep up with his secondary astronaut specialty.

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Narrative

So Close and Yet So Far Away

Drew’s back in town. Brenda wished she could really feel excited about it the way she ought to.

But it couldn’t change the fact that he couldn’t really come home, not as long as there was any question of pilots catching the diablovirus in one spaceport and then bringing it home to spread through the close quarters of a lunar settlement. Even if she took the kids down to Flight Operations to see their daddy, the closest they were going to come was seeing him through a thick moonglass window and talk over a glorified speakerphone. They could just as well FaceTime on her tablet and spare themselves the time and effort of going down to Innsmouth Sector.

Or at least that had been the plan. Instead, Brenda had gotten a call that there had been some problems with some of the air handlers up in Miskatonic Sector, and the crew needed someone slim and flexible to get into the plenum leading to them.

She couldn’t very well disappoint her dad, so she’d left the kids with a friend while she dealt with the latest emergency. At least the last two CME’s have shot off in the direction of Jupiter, so we’ve had a reprieve there, even if we are still under the solar storm watch.

Still, the work was pretty routine, and left her far too much time for thought. Like recollections of when she and Drew had first met, in those wild and crazy days right after the destruction of Luna Station. He’d been such a hero, trekking overland from a downed lander to get help for his commander, who’d been injured in the damage that had put them down there.

Her folks had been a little concerned about her getting involved with someone who was several years older. However, they hadn’t quite gone to the point of forbidding her any contact with Drew, just pointed out that she had three more months until her eighteenth birthday, and needed to remember that.

And then he managed to get a lander down on manual after the flight computer got corrupted in the cyber-attack, and everyone’s attitudes changed.

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Paying the Bills

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Narrative

Peering into the Mists of Time

Spruance Del Curtin didn’t usually go down to IT to talk with Lou Corlin. But after Dr. Doorne had given him a totally new group of data sets, he wanted to talk to Lou where they’d have ready access to the heavy iron.

Especially if this is part of something that IT’s processing.

Lou was back in one of the big server rooms, busy at a terminal of some sort. He looked up as soon as Sprue walked in.

Lou’s dark eyebrows drew down in a scowl. “Who sent you back here? This area is supposed to be authorized personnel only.”

Sprue jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the corridor. “The girl out front said you were back here. She didn’t say anything about having to wait while she got you.” He pointedly didn’t add that he’d spent several minutes flattering her before asking Lou’s whereabouts, buttering her up so she’d be more likely to let him through.

“Dang, Julie’s brand new down here. You do realize you may have just gotten her in a whole lot of trouble, if Steffi comes around and finds you back here with me. These are supposed to be secure servers that handle sensitive information. They don’t even have direct Internet connections. If we have random people coming and going, we don’t have secure servers any more because someone could just help themselves to the data.”

“Crap. I didn’t realize it was that big a deal. I just wanted to ask you about some data Dr. Doorne was having me work on. The stuff she had been having me go through is pretty clearly demographic, and I think it has something to do with the pandemic. But this stuff is completely different. I mean, the fundamental structure of the data is different.” Sprue described some of the variables that he’d been working with.

“That sounds like astronomical data. The drives that came in from Mars on the Soryu must’ve finally cleared quarantine and been cleared–“

“Data from Mars? What would she be doing with that? I mean, she’s a radio astronomer, not a planetary geologist.”

“Hasn’t she told you anything about her work? She’s one of the principal researchers in a big study that’s using FSRA and the new radio array on Mars as a truly gigantic baseline radio telescope. It’s a really complicated thing that has to adjust for general and special relativity to pull all the data together, so her background in signals analysis is absolutely critical. They’re hoping to be able to detect objects further away than ever before, and thanks to the speed of light, that means further into the past. If they’re right, they may be able to sort the last echoes of the first few mintues after the Big Bang from the cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang itself, and determine if the universe is actually part of a multiverse of universes that interact at the quantum level.”

“Wow. That sounds pretty cool.”

“Which is why you’d better get out of here, now, if you don’t want to get kicked off all her projects with a big fat black mark on your permanent record. Come over to our module lounge after supper tonight and I’ll tell you more.”

Although Sprue didn’t like being dismissed, especially not by a clone of a member of the third astronaut selection group, he could tell that persisting would only risk attracting attention. So he took his leave as gracefully as he could manage, hoping it wasn’t too obvious just how intense a curiosity was burning inside his mind right now.

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Narrative

Ripples

At the receptionist’s desk, Cindy Margrave tried not to pay too much attention as Autumn Belfontaine walked Colonel Hearne to the door. It was a gesture of courtesy — he certainly knew how to get back out of the station offices by himself. But honor was due to the commander of the last flight of the Falcon, who’d kept the crippled orbiter’s crew alive until the Incomparable Nekrasov could rescue them with Baikal.

Right now they were just making small talk, pleasantries that offered no clue about why the chief of Flight Operations should need to talk to the station’s news director. Cindy caught something about University of Minnesota, from which both of them had graduated, albeit decades apart. Probably just a reminiscence of some feature of the campus that loomed large in both their memories.

It’s probably just as well he didn’t come up here during Spruance Del Curtain’s shift. Sprue’s the sort of guy who sees something like this as a challenge to get around social conventions to find out what’s gong on.

And he’d gotten in trouble over those antics more than once. It probably didn’t help that he tended to view himself as the smartest guy in the room, and figure he could find a way around restrictions. It was an attitude that had probably put the kibosh on any chance of his ever being selected for pilot training, and it was a wonder he hadn’t been kicked off the station staff.

Although he had been more subdued lately, ever since he started doing that project for Dr. Doorne. Which reminded Cindy that she had a project of her own to finish. The sales director wanted her to do a research project for him, and she still had a lot of work to do. With less than an hour left on her shift, she needed to buckle down and get focused.

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Narrative

In the Shadow of Uncertainty

Autumn Belfontaine had not expected to get a visit from the head of Flight Operations. She knew that Bill Hearne had been a friend of her father’s, but her father had died before she was even born.

And there’s a lot of survivor guilt there. Colonel Hearne was commanding American Eagle during the NASA Massacre.

But here he was, visiting in person rather than just texting or e-mailing his questions. Autumn was getting the impression that it was a personal matter and he didn’t want records of it to be on any official NASA systems.

Which made her wish she could give him some better information. “Unfortunately, we’re not getting a whole lot of information either. A lot of the wire services have gone down, especially the Web-based ones. Even the AP and Reuters have been spotty, and I’m thinking they’ve lost a lot of their correspondents. Quite honestly, I’m getting better information from the websites of the various local radio and TV stations, especially if I’m trying to move beyond the big cities.”

That got her a nod. “Alice has been following the radio stations in the area she grew up, checking their farm reports to try to get an idea of what’s going on up there.”

Autumn recalled that Colonel Hearne’s wife had grown up on a wheat farm near Duluth. The age difference between them had imposed a distance that their both being Minnesotans and graduates of U of Minnesota couldn’t quite bridge. “I’d been following Radio K, at least until they switched to some kind of automated format after the university sent everyone home. Some of the on-air personalities have been updating their blogs, but even that’s gotten hit-and-miss.”

She paused, realized she was hesitating because what she wanted to say was a shift from reporting to editorializing. Even in a private communication like this, the distinction’s too deeply ingrained. “To be very honest, I’m concerned about just how spotty news coverage has become, and what it bodes for the future. Eventually the pandemic will have to burn itself out for the simple reason that it can no longer spread rapidly enough to sustain itself. But what will even be left by that point?”

“That’s what we’ve been thinking about too. So far NASA’s been able to hold itself together, but I’m hearing a lot of rumint from people I know down there that the cities have gotten pretty hard hit, and they’re concerned about the situation with critical infrastructure and manufacturing. I don’t know how familiar you are with industrial processes, but there are a lot of them that you can’t just turn off and back on like a light switch.”

“I covered some blackouts when I was still on Earth, so yes, I have some idea of what kinds of problems can happen when backup systems fail. Down there, they just don’t build in the redundancy we have up here, and it looks like it’s going to be biting a lot of people in the butt.” Autumn paused. “However, we’re speculating here, trying to extrapolate from way too little data. Which is a dangerous thing for news people to do.”

“Understood.” Bill Hearne pulled himself back to his feet. “Given those limitations, I won’t use up any more of your time. Thank you for letting me know what you do have.”

“And I’ll make sure to let you know if I get anything new.”

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Narrative

A Touch of Home

Bill Hearne had just finished dropping off the two terabyte drives full of transportation data at the Astronomy Department office and was heading back to his office in Flight Operations when his phone chimed incoming text. He pulled it out and was astonished to find a text from his brother Frank on the lock screen.

Are you where you can talk?

I’m on the way back to my office. What’s going on?

We’ve been pretty much isolated for the last several weeks. Word from Madison is essential travel only, minimize contact with persons outside your household while making necessary trips. I don’t think I’ve even spoken to the feed truck or milk truck drivers when they do show up, so I’m not getting even that gossip.

Hardly surprising, from everything Bill had been hearing of late. Although that was getting more and more spotty, since his pilots were under similar restrictions. As much as possible, they were supposed to stay in their spacecraft and let the robots pick up any cargo. Since all radio circuits were monitored and recorded, it did put a damper on the sort of scuttlebutt that pilots engaged in while visiting other settlements or Luna Station.

So you’re wondering what I’m hearing about the rest of the three worlds.

I was hoping you’d know something. All I know is what we see on the news, and a lot of it feels pretty canned. Out here we just don’t have the bandwidth to stream Internet radio, or I’d tune in to your station.

Bill could appreciate that. When he was a kid growing up, the old home place was still on a party line. You always had to carefully pick up the phone and check to see if anyone else was on before you started dialing. His sister Kate had gotten in trouble a couple of times, getting home from school and being so eager to start calling all her friends that she didn’t notice one of the neighbors was already talking and just started dialing.

They’d gone to private lines some time after he graduated college, while he was on his first tour of duty. He’d gotten back to the States and came home on leave to discover the change the hard way. He’d needed to call one of the neighbors — he didn’t even remember why — and had automatically held down the flashhook while dialing, the way you had to on a party line, only to discover it wouldn’t go through.

Even after the Internet became a Thing for civilians, it had taken over a decade before the nearest dialup ISP number was a local call. Not that he was going to hook up any Air Force or NASA-issued laptop to an unsecured line, but being able to e-mail his family would’ve made keeping in touch a lot easier during the Energy Wars, at least while he wasn’t flying secret military missions like the one he’d been commanding the day of the NASA Massacre.

I don’t know if being able to stream our broadcasts would give you all that much more information than you’re getting on TV. Bill considered just how much he wanted to tell his brother. With everything in such a fragile state, the wrong information, or even just something out of context, could be worse than nothing. Especially considering that Frank needed to focus on keeping the family farms running, it wouldn’t do to go spilling his own concerns. Right now we’re pretty limited in our sources, or so the news director’s said.

Got it. Take care up there, big brother.

Will do. He put his phone back in his pocket and continued on his way. Right now neither of them could do anything to help the other’s situation, so perhaps it was best that they didn’t have much in the way of details. Enough that they each knew the other was reasonably all right.