Tag: Betty Margrave

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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

Awkward Questions

By the time Cindy got back home, her mind was itching with curiosity about those early days of the Flannigan Administration. Days she sort of remembered, glimpses of things on TV without any context, hurriedly turned off or changed to another channel if an adult noticed she was looking in that direction. Vague answers about bad people doing bad things and how she should not worry because she was safe here and Adult Authority would protect her.

Reflecting on those days with the experience of a decade and a half, she wondered how much she was confusing memories of national events with memories of her parents’ accident. She and her sister had been safely at home with a sitter that night, since their parents had been going to an event for grown-ups, so all her memories were of strange people suddenly appearing at the door, of a neighbor’s adult daughter coming over to stay with them for a couple of days until Uncle Carl and Aunt Betty could pick them up and make the necessary arrangements. A vague memory of what she now knew to be a courtroom, in which they were granted legal guardianship, but which at the time had been frightening in its echoing vastness.

One thing was certain — she had no meaningful memories of the events themselves. And she was pretty sure that what she’d been told in school back on Earth had been so heavily slanted that it was best discounted altogether.

And since we got up here, everything’s been either practical stuff like safety and first aid or science and technology, until the time came up to take our mandatory Constitution class.

She’d no more than stepped into the apartment when one of her cousins gave her a sharp shhhh and whispered,”Mom’s got a headache. Something happened at work, I don’t know what, but she came back looking awful and went straight to bed.”

Cindy nodded her acknowledgement, scarcely daring to breathe. A sudden headache… her guts clenched with dread. Hadn’t that been one of the symptoms of the diablovirus?

Except it was also a symptom of a dozen other things, some minor and others very dangerous. Dwell too long on the worst possibilities and you’d be running up to Medlab certain that you were in the throes of a cerebral aneurysm or a brain tumor when you’d just gotten a kink in your neck.

In the meantime, maybe she’d better start thinking about who else she could go to with her questions. People who were definitely old enough to have clear memories of that period and understand what they saw, but who wouldn’t consider it an imposition to take some time to talk with her about those events. While she was getting old enough that adults were starting to take her seriously, it was still tricky to know exactly where the boundaries were when it came to conversations that didn’t immediately relate to work or class.

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Narrative

New Reasons to Worry

Autumn Belfontaine had just started sounding out some of her contacts in Engineering, trying to find out who had the strongest background in backup and emergency power generation, when she got a text from Betty Margrave. No explanation, just a request to come by Security.

So here she was, cooling her heels in the reception area. At least she could surf local news websites on her phone while she waited, and not look like she was indulging in nerves. As news director for Shepardsport Pirate Radio, she was just doing her job.

And then her name was called, and now she was inside the office of the Chief of Security. Was it her imagination, or did Betty Margrave look like she’d aged several years in the last few weeks?

Certainly the woman looked exhausted, with dark circles under her eyes. Her hair looked brittle and lifeless, another sign that she was pushing herself to exhaustion.

Does Dr. Thuc realize just how bad off she’s getting? Even as the thought came to Autumn’s mind, she realized Shepardsport’s chief flight surgeon probably had as much work, if not more, down at Medlab.

And there was no time to ponder it, because Betty was talking. “…need to know where this information is coming from. Having rumors running around the place is bad enough when they’re false and we can offer facts to the contrary. But there are just enough facts here that they can be spun into something that can result in panic.”

Autumn’s cheeks warmed with embarrassment as she realized she’d started listening only after Betty had directly referred to whatever rumors she was concerned about. And given the current situation, it could be any of half a dozen things that someone could come across by surfing onto the blog or social media page of someone who knew a little bit about the situation. And there was no way to ask without admitting that her mind had been elsewhere when she should’ve been listening.

Might as well just brazen it out. “Absolutely. That’s why there are a number of subjects that will be covered on-air only after we’ve run it past the appropriate authorities, specifically so we don’t spread rumors or dangerously inaccurate information. Right now a lot of it’s medical, and sometimes the embargo has to last longer than I’d like because Medstaff is so busy right now. But there are some sensitive political items that I always run past command, just in case there are reason Captain Waite needs something kept quiet for some length of time.”

“That’s good.” Betty actually seemed pleased, although her expression remained weary. Maybe she was tired enough that the signs of Autumn’s lapse had slipped right past her. “Especially when we’re looking at the possibility of having to enact much more stringent isolation measures here in Shepardsport, depending on what news we get from Schirrasburg Medlab.”

Autumn’s nerves tingled with alarm. Schirrasburg had had a close call earlier, but that individual had turned out to have an ordinary respiratory illness of the sort that periodically swept through lunar habitats in spite of every space operator’s pre-launch quarantine rules. But if they had a second potential case…

“What kinds of measures would we be talking about?”

“At the moment things are still under discussion, and it doesn’t help that so many of the people at Johnson are indefinitely out of the office.” Read that as sick, likely with the diablovirus, maybe even deceased. “But if there’s any strong reason to believe that any of our people was in contact with the infected individual, we’d be talking about a lot tighter controls on interpersonal contact. We’d definitely have to shut down the dining commons and have all meals sent via deliverybot, although right now that would be difficult for the simple reason that we don’t have enough bots to do it. And we couldn’t have people hanging out together in the lounges of residential modules, or in department offices up in Miskatonic Sector. It’s going to make group study hard, and it’s going to play hobs with our physical fitness program, but this thing is a killer. Not as bad in areas where people have good general health — we’ve known that ever since it started — but still bad enough that it could very easily sweep through a lunar settlement. And unlike dirtside cities, we cannot afford to have a significant number of our critical workers laid up with this thing.”

“Completely agreed. I’ll sound out the reporters and the dj’s, see if one of them is the source of the leak. But to be completely honest, we’ve got a lot of people with ties to Schirrasburg. So it’s completely possible it started with a private e-mail or text message that someone else saw. We may never know for sure where it came from.”

“Well, do what you can. With luck we can avoid having to make an official matter of it.”

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Narrative

A Worrisome Situation

After her conversation with Dr. Doorne about statistics and metrics, Betty Margrave was feeling a lot less reassured about the present situation. Which was why she had decided it was time to talk to Bill Hearne.

When she’d first contacted him, she was thinking in terms of meeting him in his office down at Flight Operations. However, he was concerned about holding a routine consultation down there. Yes, there was the concern about infectuous agents, whether on an object that had not been properly sterilized or by someone who had contact with an infected person. But there was also the problem of Flight Operations being somewhat in disarray right now, what with all the pilots having to be quarantined down here instead of going home to their families.

There had been a moment of awkwardness, given that Betty was married to a pilot-astronaut who was currently sitting down there in the BOQ. Sure, they could FaceTime each other, but they could do it when he was in any spaceport all over the Moon.

But Betty wasn’t going to make an issue of it. Bill was only able to go home to Alice every night right now because he’d reached mandatory retirement age for pilots, and had taken over the top job in Flight Ops so that Colonel Carlyle could be freed up to fly full-time again instead of squeezing in a minimum of flight time among ground duties.

So here they were in the Safety and Security conference room, which had been set up specifically so S&S personnel could meet with people who were not cleared to deal with private information. In many ways going the other way would’ve been easier for the reason that Flight Ops very rarely dealt with material that could not be generally disseminated, and what little they did have (some classified military projects and the occasional medical issue) could easily be sequestered from general meeting spaces.

They had been talking mostly about spacelift, and how both the raw numbers and the distribution of spaceflights had changed since the beginning of the diablovirus pandemic. Somehow the subject had drifted to transportation in general, and how much it was changing. Betty knew that the cruise ships and casual airline travel had been shut down almost as soon as it became clear that they were dealing with something deadly. She’d also heard anecdotal reports about varying levels of restriction on personal mobility, from “stay at home orders” that were on the level of polite requests to blockades and arrests, even one story of a person being shot for breaking quarantine.

Where had that been? Bill averred that he’d heard it, but couldn’t recall exactly where. He wanted to say Germany, but both of them agreed that it was unwise to let past history do their thinking for them, especially in the absence of solid facts. For all they knew, it was a hypothetical that got turned into a friend-of-a-friend story courtesy of social media.

But by the time they were finished, he had agreed that it was time to pull together as much transportation data they could find and see what Dr. Doorne’s number-crunchers could make of it.

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Considering Necessary Measures

In ordinary times, Reginald Waite would’ve called his Chief of Safety and Security and his Chief Flight Surgeon in to his office for a conference. However, these were not ordinary times, and he didn’t want to take either of them away from their regular duties any longer than necessary. As a result, a three-way text messaging session was just going to have to do.

At least both of them were aware of the uncertain space weather forecast, with multiple solar astronomers disagreeing on the significance of the disturbances within the Sun’s magnetic field and what it foretold in regards to future solar storm activity. So it was just a matter of discussing how various possible outcomes would affect their particular areas of operations, and how to go about coordinating efforts to mitigate the damage, so they would not waste resources by duplicating efforts, or worse, end up working at cross purposes.

By the end of the conference, he was confident that they were all on the same page, and shouldn’t need more than daily check-ins to make sure everything was moving forward smoothly. Thinking he was finished, Reggie went to check his e-mail when he noticed another text had come in.

Wondering why Autumn Belfontaine was texting him, he pulled it up.

Since it looks like we could be having an extended disruption of spacelift, it might be good to put together some PSA’s on conserving the things we can’t produce locally.

It certainly sounded like a good idea, which made him wonder why she thought she needed to ask permission. On the other hand, given the tension with the Administration, he could also see why she might be concerned about revealing weaknesses that could be used against them.

Write up some possibilities and e-mail them to me. We can work out what revisions are necessary.

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Narrative

That Uneasy Feeling

Cather Hargreaves had spent most of the afternoon on a video conference call with the senior security staff of the other major American lunar settlements. A guy from NASA headquarters in Washington was supposed to have joined them. However, he’d failed to call, leaving the Lunans to talk among themselves.

It had been particularly uncomfortable when he’d realized that he and Betty Margrave were having one discussion while everyone else was carrying on their own conversation. It was almost as if the others viewed him and Betty as tainted, people it was best to have as little to do with as possible.

On the other hand, one only had to look at him to know he was a clone. Sure, everyone remembered his ur-brother with the famous scars, but no one could fail to recognize the distinctive dark eyebrows that made their faces almost top-heavy, and make the connection. And everyone knew Shepardsport was the settlement NASA was using as a depository for the inmates of their clone creches, so Betty was suspect even for those who didn’t realize she was married to a clone of Alan Shepard.

Maybe we ought to be grateful that we haven’t had our asses packed over to Farside.

Still, the experience had put him in a despondent mood as he returned home. Their apartment was actually closer to Grissom City’s IT facilities than the main security office, which made it pretty plain how the Housing Bureau regarded his and Toni’s respective lines of work.

Cather entered their apartment to find it quiet. Unusual, since Toni usually was home by this time. Could something have come up with the computers, that she had to stay late?

Or maybe she got a message from JPL that they were having trouble with Dispater? Although she was no longer officially on the Dispater team since being sent up here, she had been one of the key programmers of the probe’s AI — and four light-hours away from Earth, it needed sophisticated AI to carry out complex experiments and maneuvers.

And from what she’d been saying, the Los Angeles Basin was getting particularly hard by that stuff, and JPL wasn’t getting spared. If a lot of their on-site programmers were calling in sick, they’d be casting the net wide to find anyone who’d ever worked with that software.

Jase and Ronnie usually got home a little later, so at least their absence was no cause for worry. Worst case, he could activate the parental tracking apps on their phones and make sure they were indeed where he expected them to be. The kids were a study in how the straight-arrow Chaffee temparament mixed with Toni’s more headstrong disposition, which tended to view “no” as a challenge.

As Cather checked the fridge to see what he could throw together for supper, the door opened. Toni set her briefcase on the table, but didn’t extract her laptop. “Cather, how well do you know Lou Corlin?”

“About as well as the rest of my clone-brothers from the NASA clone creches.” Cather mentally went through the list of them. “He’s Emiko’s boyfriend, he does the Rising Sun J-pop show on Shepardsport Pirate Radio, and if I remember correctly, he works in IT over there. I’ve met him a few times when business took me over there, but I haven’t really had the time to cultivate relationships with those kids.”

It stung to have to admit that lapse. He should’ve figured out some way to step into the breach after Braden Maitland’s death, but it had never seemed all that urgent. That was a level-headed bunch of kids, and Ken Redmond and Sid Abernathy were both taking an interest in everyone in the Grissom lineage. Heck, Ken had sent him e-mails making sure all was well.

Toni just nodded. “Lou sent me a rather odd text right after lunch. Something about just how hard it would be to pinpoint the location of a person without breaking any privacy laws.”

“That’s an interesting question.” Cather considered the implications. “It would depend on what information you had on that person, not to mention your relationship to them. A parent of a minor child has a lot more resources available than, say, a friend or a distant relative. If you’d like, I can contact Lou and see what’s raised the question. For all we know, it could be a completely theoretical matter. Maybe he’s taking a class in crime and mystery literature and wanted your take on the plausibility of something he read.”

“Or it could be someone spoofing his e-mail in hopes of entrapping me for one reason or another.” Toni moved her briefcase, then sat down at the table. “Which is why it may be best for you to contact him. It’s much less likely that they would’ve also compromised my phone.”

Cather promised he’d send Lou a text as soon as they were done eating. Right now he had a supper to fix, and the kids would be home soon.

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A Bitter Pill

Betty Margrave knew the information would hit Autumn Belfontaine hard, given her personal history. It had been a punch in the gut for Betty, because of her two nieces.

Small wonder Kitty was taking such an intense interest in Amy’s situation. She’s just old enough to understand what could’ve happened if I hadn’t been able to get to her and Cindy as quickly as I did, or I hadn’t been able to bring the authority of an FBI agent to the table when the child welfare people started making noises about the girls being taken in by a dual-career couple.

By the time Autumn finished reading the summation of the situation, her hands were shaking so badly she had to set the tablet down rather than try to pass it back. In the Moon’s lighter gravity a fall was far less likely to do it harm, but it certainly wouldn’t do it any good.

“This is disgusting.” She was so angry her voice shook, sounding quite unlike the professional voice people knew from her radio broadcasts.

She took a deep breath, except it came in a sharp gasp. Yes, she was trying to regain control over her emotions, but no, it wasn’t working nearly as well as she wanted it to. “I mean, I know that they’ve got to be short-staffed, if things are as bad as we’re hearing. But to just round up all the kids whose parents are in the hospital and herd them into schools turned into makeshift dormitories–“

“What do you expect from a government operation?” That was Eli Mallory, who was leaning against the doorframe in a pose very similar to a photo of Alan Shepard in one of his best-known biographies.

Betty had to fight not to laugh. She’d seen plenty of botch jobs in her FBI days. Even the Marine Corps and NASA, organizations in which lives were on the line, had their issues. But as a representative of the command structure of the settlement, she had to be careful about anything that could be taken as mockery or disrespect to the authority upon which it rested. “You might want to be careful how you say that. This settlement happens to be a government operation.”

Anyone else, it might have taken aback. But Sheps prided themselves on always having a snappy comeback “True, but up here you’ve got to be on the top of your game if you want to be around for very long.”

“He does have a point.” Autumn had recovered some of her composure, although her radio voice wasn’t quite back. “We managed to get over five hundred kids from the NASA clone creche settled in without anything approaching the mess the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services seems to be trying to cover up. Although you’ve got to allow that these kids were raised to be competent, responsible and industrious from the beginning, so it’s probably not quite comparable to a bunch of random kids from the general community.”

From the sound of that comment, Autumn must’ve been drawing from some personal memories. Then she looked straight at Betty. “However, that’s all a distraction. Right now we need to decide how to handle this. My instinct is to go on the air and blow it wide open.”

“And you’re not sure if that’s the best way to handle it, or if that’s the anger talking.” Betty studied the younger woman. In the last few years she’d gotten a good measure of Autumn Belfontaine, and could tell where her major weak points lay. “How about you write the story up as if you were going to file it for a news agency. Then I’ll take a look at it and see if it’s a go or if we need to run it past higher authority.”

Both of them knew that higher authority meant Captain Waite.

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Fighting Like Brothers

Spruance Del Curtin didn’t like the feeling of being in over his head. He’d only come down here because Brenda Redmond had asked him to, and he had an obligation to her.

But right now he was feeling very much like a fifth wheel. It wasn’t like he was any great whiz in IT Sure, he’d recognized the signs that most everyone down there was on the wrong track and growing more obsessively persistent about it — but once he’d made the necessary connections with people who would actually listen, he had been pretty much peripheral to the actual process of detecting, identifying and eliminating the malware that had infested the servers that managed Shepardsport’s connections with the outside universe.

And when Brenda had called him, she’d been thinking in terms of sorting out that garbled text Kitty Margrave had received from her friend dirtside. That was a puzzle that might have benefited from his connections with Dr. Doorne, who was an expert in signals processing, among other things.

But now that it had been followed by a very disturbing text that looked as if someone were trying very hard to convince everyone that nothing sinister was going on, he was pretty much surplus. However, until it got time that he actually needed to go somewhere, it would be hard for him to leave without looking like he was abandoning everyone.

However, from what he could hear of Betty Margrave’s conversation with Steffi Roderick down in IT, he might be getting a reprieve really soon. Soon they’d have someone up here who was pretty clearly a specialist in getting into other people’s systems without leaving obvious tracks, getting the information they needed, and getting back out without raising alarms. Then he could quietly excuse himself and head off to something that would nominally be something he was more adept at.

And then the door opened. “Hey, Sprue, what did you do to get sent down here this time?”

Sprue had to look up to see which of his clone-brothers had just arrived and was ribbing him. It would be Eli Mallory.

“So you’re the only hacker Steffi was able to scrounge up?” Not his best comeback, but better than nothing.

Betty Margrave looked up. “That’s enough, guys. If the two of you can’t manage to work together peaceably, figure out which one of you will leave.”

Which was the excuse Sprue needed to finally get out of here. “As it just happens, I need to get going if I’m going to get lunch before my air shift.”

Not as sharp as he would’ve liked it, but at least it got him out of here. Let Eli play hacker today. Sprue had other things to do.

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Narrative

Hacker Wanted

Work was the best way to keep the mind occupied, Steffi Roderick told herself. There was no telling how long it might take her brother to notice the e-mail he’d sent here, especially if communications were so snarled that his voice mail wasn’t even engaging and calls went to a busy signal.

And there was always plenty of work around the IT department, even when they weren’t trying to debug someone else’s equipment remotely. She had several projects she needed to touch base with people on — not necessarily urgent things, but still needing accomplished, and soon.

So when her phone rang, she assumed it would be Matt, finally calling her back. Which made it rather embarrassing when the caller proved to be Betty Margrave, calling from the Safety and Security offices.

“I’m looking for a hacker.”

Steffi’s guts clenched with dread. “What have they broken into now?”

“No, it’s not that kind of trouble. I need someone who’s skilled at getting into systems. My niece has been keeping in contact with a friend in Houston, and this friend’s family has been having some serious problems. We just got a text from her that just doesn’t seem right.”

As Betty read the text, Steffi had to agree — there was something fishy about the wording. Like an adult trying to sound like a child, and coming across more like what they thought a child ought to be saying rather than how kids really talked.

“So you’re trying to find out where that message came from, and what’s really going on with this Amy.”

“Exactly. Right now I’m not sure how much I can trust any of my old contacts on the ground down in Houston. I’m thinking we’re going to need to take a look inside some systems we’re not exactly welcome in. Which means I’m going to need the best hacker you can get me.”

The best hacker Steffi knew would be Toni Hargreaves, but she was over at Grissom City, and from what Betty was saying, this job didn’t sound like the sort one could do from verbal descriptions and texted screenshots. Lou Corlin had a lot of raw talent in the area — he’d been instrumental in setting up their streaming server — but he had that Chaffee tendency to be a straight-arrow. Even with the chief of security giving him the go-ahead to get into those systems, he wouldn’t feel that sense of no is a technical challenge that was essential to this kind of hacking.

The next best would be any of several kids she’d immediately thought as probable culprits when she thought Betty was looking to take down a hacker. Every one of those kids had pulled various stunts that weren’t quite bad enough to get them in legal trouble, but still enough to warrant official attention within the settlement.

And most of them were Sheps. On one hand, that might be a good thing — Betty was married to a Shep, so there was a familial obligation.

On the other hand, Sheps were not easy to manage. And if she sent more than one, they might well get so competitive that they’d end up sabotaging each other’s work.

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Searching

Being Chief of Security for a major lunar settlement did have its perks, Betty Margrave had to admit. For one thing, it gave her access to databases not available to ordinary citizens. Databases that might help her track down Kitty’s friend Amy.

However, the further Betty searched, the more concerned she became. Ordinarily she should’ve had the girl’s location pinpointed within a few searches, especially since Kitty had given her the phone number.

Just how bad were things getting down there? Houston was a major port city, with ships coming and going every day. Maybe not the level of traffic as they’d experienced during the Energy Wars, when they’d been shipping POL’s to the troops in the Middle East, but the port of Houston still handled a lot of traffic — which meant people coming and going, a perfect situation for the spread of a dangerous new virus.

Which is what makes Slayton Field so high risk too. Betty pushed the thought out of her mind. She knew her opposite numbers in Grissom City were keeping a close eye on the situation — just yesterday she’d been teleconferencing with Greg Shipton and Cather Hargreaves on just that subject, going over quarantine procedures for a spaceport that had to be kept operating to support the myriad scientific and mining outposts scattered across the lunar surface.

Still, that little thread of worry crept along the back of her mind. Carl was to fly over there tomorrow, to deliver biologicals and pick up some minerals. According to the flight plan, he and his pilot would stay in the lander the entire time they were there, and interact with ground crew only by radio. He was probably safer there than in takeoff or landing.

In the meantime, she had a girl to track down. The last Kitty knew, Amy had gone with the parents of a friend while her own parents were both taken to the hospital. However, her cellphone metadata wasn’t showing her as being at that location.

In fact, for the last fifteen hours there was no metadata at all for her. Could the logging systems be that badly behind? Or could her phone have been confiscated and turned off for some transgression, real or imaginary?

Which left Betty with the problem of how to find out, when she was uncertain whether her authority up here would translate into anything meaningful down there.