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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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Sutty, an Observer from Earth for the interstellar Ekumen, has been assigned to a new world—a world in the grips of a stern monolithic state, the Corporation. Embracing the sophisticated technology brought by other worlds and desiring to advance even faster into the future, the Akans recently outlawed the past, the old calligraphy, certain words, all ancient beliefs and ways; every citizen must now be a producer-consumer. Their state, not unlike the China of the Cultural Revolution, is one of secular terrorism. Traveling from city to small town, from loudspeakers to bleating cattle, Sutty discovers the remnants of a banned religion, a hidden culture. As she moves deeper into the countryside and the desolate mountains, she learns more about the Telling—the old faith of the Akans—and more about herself. With her intricate creation of an alien world, Ursula K. Le Guin compels us to reflect on our own recent history.

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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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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.”

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Narrative

Getting Pinged

All day long, Spruance Del Curtin kept thinking about what Dr. Doorne had said. Sprue was not entirely unfamiliar with growth curves, since they’d gone over them in stats, and they’d been touched upon in a biology class he’d taken a while back.

What he really wanted to know was the nature of the growth that was being measured. Especially with the wild rumors going around about the situation in Schirrasburg, Sprue wondered if Dr. Doorne had been discussing statistics on the spread of the diablovirus.

Except there was no good way to find out. He couldn’t ask because that would be admitting that he’d listened in on a conversation in which he had no part. And since he’d so little, and that quite vague, he had nothing to go on for making discreet inquiries around the settlement.

Face it, you’re out of options. Sprue didn’t like that conclusion. He was a Shep, and part of that geneset’s intense competitiveness was a ferocious determination.

But with nothing to go on, there was no real place to start. Unless he got a lucky break and happened upon something that pointed him in the right direction, he was out of the running.

Which meant he needed to get his mind on something more productive. He had more than enough work to do, between Dr. Doorne pushing him to do some of the most difficult statistical analysis with real data, as opposed to the standard teaching datasets the other students were getting, and his teaching responsibility becoming steadily heavier as his senior teacher pushed more and more onto him.

He was just starting on his latest lesson plan for that when his phone chimed incoming text. He pulled it up, discovered it was from Drew. Found anything yet?

Sprue considered how to answer that one. If it had been Ken Redmond asking, there would’ve been no question of admitting that he’d been listening in on Dr. Doorne’s telephone conversation. But Drew was a fellow Shep, and he’d take a more relaxed view of such things, especially when it might benefit him.

I’ve heard a few things around Science, but so far I haven’t been able to get any hard facts to back them with. But if you want some speculation, I’m thinking they’re looking at Schirrasburg as a test case in the limits of contagion in a closed population.

He paused for a moment before actually hitting the send button. It was just evasive enough about his sources that even if someone in authority were to go through his SMS logs, they wouldn’t be able to say that he’d been eavesdropping.

Drew must’ve needed to think about it too, because it was several minutes before he responded. Long enough for Sprue to decide it was time to dig back in on his work.

He was just getting back into that mindset when the text chime pulled him back out of his thoughts. Which indicates that they had something going around there, although not definite proof that it was the diablovirus.

But if it were just an ordinary bug, why would they be so hush-hush about it that we’ve got rumors all over the place? All they’d have to say is someone’s picked up a case of the flu and it’s spreading, so they’re taking some extra precautions to make sure it doesn’t spread in the middle of a crisis. Then everybody could stop worrying.

Once again Drew took a long time to reply, which left Sprue wondering if that last observation hadn’t been a wise move. Finally the writing message icon showed up, and then the text appeared. You underestimate the bureaucratic mind.

The whole knowledge is power thing?

More than just that. You never want to let information get out that makes you look bad if you can avoid it. That’s why so much embarrassing information gets classified as secret, even when there’s no national security reason.

And why people keep covering things up, never mind that it’s usually the coverup that gets them in trouble, not the actual thing they were covering up.

Exactly. Which is why I’m thinking that it was a diablovirus outbreak, and it was seriously bad.

I’d believe it. But I sure don’t know how to go about confirming it.

Keep thinking about it, but whatever you do, be careful about it.

Sprue promised he would, which seemed to satisfy Drew. Now to get some serious work done on that lesson plan. Maybe he’d get some ideas while his mind was off the problem.

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The launch of a new science fiction adventure series–by the New York Times-best selling author of the Safehold series and the Honor Harrington series

The Galactic Hegemony has been around a long time, and it likes stability–the kind of stability that member species like the aggressive, carnivorous Shongairi tend to disturb. So when the Hegemony Survey Force encountered a world whose so-called “sentients”–“humans,” they called themselves–were almost as bad as the Shongairi themselves, it seemed reasonable to use the Shongairi to neutralize them before they could become a second threat to galactic peace. And if the Shongairi took a few knocks in the process, all the better.

Now, Earth is conquered. The Shongairi have arrived in force, and humanity’s cities lie in radioactive ruins. In mere minutes, more than half the human race has died.

Master Sergeant Stephen Buchevsky, who thought he was being rotated home from his latest tour in Afghanistan, finds himself instead prowling the back country of the Balkans, dodging alien patrols and trying to organize scattered survivors without getting killed. And in the southeastern US, firearms instructor and former Marine Dave Dvorak finds himself at the center of a growing network of resistance–putting his extended family at lethal risk, but what else can you do?

On the face of it, Buchevsky’s and Dvorak’s chances look bleak, as do prospects for the rest of the surviving human race. But it may well be that Shongairi and the Hegemony alike have underestimated the inhabitants of that strange planet called Earth… in David Weber’s Out of the Dark.

At the Publisher’s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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Narrative

Dirty Little Secrets

Brenda turned the USB stick over and over in her hand, trying to decide whether she wanted to go through with this. On one hand, Lou Corlin had put himself at significant risk to go poking around some of those places he was talking about. On the other, if his skills at checking and cleaning those files wasn’t as good as he thought they were, she could manage to corrupt her entire laptop, perhaps even any networks it might be connected with.

It would be so much simpler if she had a spare computer with no network connections at all. A computer she could take chances with, without risking all her data, or even other computers here in Shepardsport.

But she wasn’t in a position to have that kind of luxury. Things had been tight up here ever since the Expulsions, which meant there was no such thing as surplussed equipment. You kept things running until they wore out, and then you sent them back to IT to be used in repairing other computers.

On the other hand, Lou did know what he was doing, and he was meticulous about getting the job done right. And if he’d been prowling around the dark side of the ‘Net, he had taken a pretty serious risk on her behalf. To refuse to look at what he’d dug up would be to disrespect his effort.

However, it didn’t mean she needed to take stupid chances. Carefully sitting Lou’s USB stick where she wouldn’t lose track of it, she retrieved one of her own and made a backup of everything on her laptop.

Only when she knew that all her data was backed up and the backup USB stick safely back in her bag did she finally mount Lou’s USB stick on her desktop. As she began to look through the folders, all neatly organized, she realized just how far Lou had gone for her.

Someone, somewhere, had gotten into a bunch of Chicago Police Department databases and dumped it somewhere on the darknet. Some of this stuff was video straight from cop dash cams and body cams. There was no way in heck any law enforcement agency would ever allow it out in the wild uncut like this.

Not to mention the 911 audio files and transcripts. Some of them could easily have serious privacy issues, depending on exactly what was on them. However, she was pretty confident that she was looking at the facts behind the rumor Drew had heard about warlords in the sketchier parts of the south side of Chicago.

And that was just the first few folders she’d gone through. If she was right, at least some of it would relate to the situation over at Schirrasburg.

Which meant she now had the problem of figuring out how to get this material to Drew without raising questions for which there could be no acceptable answers. A direct handoff would be ideal — but could she figure out a way to pass a physical object to Drew, given the quarantine measures that separated pilots from their families even during so-called personal visits?

First she needed to contact him, and carefully drop the hints that she had some seriously hot information. Then they could work out the particulars.