Tag: Brenda Redmond

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Narrative

Hello Goodbye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hi, Cindy. What is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Narrative

Heart to Heart

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Document

A Little History

Shepardsport Pirate Radio started almost by accident. It was right as the Expulsions were really getting started. A bunch of us kids were sitting around in the big lounge in Miskatonic Sector, talking about the situation. Somebody wondered aloud how many people down there realized that this wasn’t a voluntary exodus, no matter what the Russian tsar might have intended when he issued his invitation.

So it went from just another bull session to a very earnest discussion of how we could get the word out about what was really happening. [laughs] When you get older, it’s easy to forget just how passionate teenagers can be about something that matters to them.

One of the guys, I think it was one of the Sheps but it could’ve been a Cooper or a Conrad, pipes up with the idea of an underground newspaper. Not surprising, since we’d been studying World War II in history class and Mrs. Townsend was having us read a book about the various resistance movements, including their various clandestine presses and newsletters. And there was a really popular teen-lit book right then about a school with a dysfunctional administration and how the kids circulated a secret newsletter about everything nobody could talk about.

Of course we knew we weren’t going to be printing up a physical paper. That was so twentieth century, and up here on the Moon, copy paper was a scarce resource anyway. But everybody’s got a computer up here, and HTML’s not that hard to learn, at least enough to put up a credible Website. Lou Corlin and a couple of the other guys with work responsibilities down in IT said they could do the fancy CSS to make it look like a professional newspaper’s website.

That was when Autumn Belfontaine overheard us talking and dropped in to ask us just how much traffic we really thought we could get for a straight-up digital newspaper. There were millions of blogs and billions of static websites, and most of them could count their monthly visitors in the hundreds. We needed to be able to offer our audience more, something they’d come for the enjoyment and then listen to the news while they were waiting for the next entertainment segment.

That was when she suggested a pirate radio station. She’d actually worked in radio, so she knew how a station would be run. She probably could’ve been our general manager if she’d wanted the job, but she was a reporter first, foremost and always, so she decided to be the news director and teach the rest of us how to be reporters and DJ’s.

The more we talked about our plans, the more I realized there was going to be a lot more nitty-gritty than just scheduling or even coming up with funding to pay royalties on our music. We’d need a place to set up a studio, and a lot of equipment, not to mention access to the bandwidth to transmit it back dirtside, since there was no way we could do an actual airwaves transmission like the old pirate radio stations on Earth.

No, this wasn’t a lark us kids could do with a half dozen laptops and some cheap mics. We were going to have to get the adults involved, which meant that Autumn was going to have to somehow get the senior leadership convinced that we were actually doing something serious and productive.

And then Luna Station blew up and the Kitty Hawk Massacre happened, and all of a sudden Captain Waite was wanting to talk to all of us about getting the truth out.

Brenda Redmond, “The Beginnings of Shepardsport Pirate Radio” from The Lunar Resistance: An Oral History. Kennedy University Press, Carpenter Point, Tycho Crater, 2059.

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Narrative

Just a Friendly Warning

Being the daughter of the settlement’s Chief of Engineering had its perks, but there were also times when it could be difficult. Like when he takes you aside for a “little talk.”

Brenda tried not to avoid her father’s gaze. “Honest, I was just making conversation with Sprue yesterday evening. Especially since we both work at the radio station, I couldn’t exactly ignore him.”

Ken Redmond gave a curt little nod. “We’ve talked about the importance of discretion in your line of work.”

“Dad, please, I know all that.” Brenda hoped she wasn’t coming across as a whiny little kid, but she just wished he’d let it go. Quite honestly, there wasn’t that much she could’ve told Sprue. She was vaguely aware that the news department was seeing a lot of stuff that wasn’t getting passed to the DJ’s, and at least some of it was getting passed up from Medlab. She’d overheard Autumn Belfontaine talking with Dr. Thuc, and that halfalogue did not sound like someone receiving good news.

But how could she tell him without looking like she was telling him gossip? Or worse, looking self-serving?

Maybe it was just as well to promise to be more careful in the future — and to watch and listen a little more closely to what was going on in the news department. Sprue was right — whatever this business was, it was big, and someone was very interested in keeping a lid on it.

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Narrative

In Search of Answers

The children were sound asleep and Brenda was supposed to be getting ready for bed. However, enough troubling thoughts were running through her head that she could tell that trying to go to sleep would be futile. Spruance Del Curtin was right — something was going on, no matter how hard people in authority were trying to keep it quiet.

How long had she been sitting her looking at her phone, trying to decide whether to text her husband or not? Things would’ve been so much easier if Drew could just get transferred over here from Slayton Field.

Except she’d never wanted to pressure him about it just in case it were to have a negative effect upon his career. Although her father had gone into the reserves and started working for NASA before she was born, she’d grown up with a fair understanding of what it meant to be an officer’s wife.

Including the way her actions could reflect upon him. She had to assume that all communications would be monitored — some early astronauts had gotten into awkward situations when their conversations were captured by microphones aboard their spacecraft and subsequently listened to by mission controllers on Earth.

And if someone in authority had a vested interest in keeping something quiet, it could be very dangerous to ask too many questions. Or at least to ask them too openly.

Which meant it might not be wise to use text messaging right now. Although it wasn’t as realtime as voice telecom — until you tapped the send button, you could still revise or erase a text — the back-and-forth nature of texting made it easy to write too quickly and not consider your words.

Maybe she’d be better off sending him an e-mail. She could consider her words carefully, maybe even save it as draft and come back tomorrow morning to re-read it with fresh eyes.

And make it look like something insignificant, that was the ticket. Just another crazy stunt Sprue was pulling, as if they were going to just laugh it off. That way, if Drew really didn’t know anything of significance, he wouldn’t end up curious enough to ask her awkward questions.

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Narrative

More Questions than Answers

The module lounge was already crowded by the time Sprue got back from supper and his mandatory exercise hours. Not surprising, since this residential module had a particularly nice lounge, complete with an electric fireplace and a fish tank, in addition to the usual planters brimming with spider plants. Which meant that whenever people were doing group study, they tended to come here instead of the other people’s residential modules.

Sprue wasn’t really excited about retreating into his apartment to study. Not that his roommate was all that difficult to get along with, but there just wasn’t room. Sure, the nightstand could fold out into a desk, and there was a sling-back chair, but do that too much and your subconscious started to associate the place with work instead of sleep.

And then he saw Brenda Redmond, the Chief Engineer’s daughter. Or Brenda Redmond-Reinholt as she now styled herself, at least when she wasn’t doing her air shifts.

Dammit, why do both the girls you really want to catch have to go and marry your clone-brothers?

Still, the fact that Brenda was married to a pilot from Grissom City meant that she might be in the know. And right now Sprue wanted to know just what was going on. For certain it was a whole lot larger than just a Mayday by one cruise ship.

He leaned over the back of the couch where she was sitting, looked over her shoulder at the tablet in her hands. Routine refresher course on communications protocols from the look of things. He’d done that course last term and had it out of the way for another three years.

Before he could even speak, she said, “Hello, Sprue. What are you up to now?” She didn’t even bother to look up from her tablet.

Usually that was an indication that the person really didn’t want to speak to you, but Sprue had a fairly good idea of how far he could bend the rules and get away with it. He slid over the couch and into the seat beside her. “Just wondering if you’d heard anything about stuff going on.”

This time it got Brenda to look up from her work. “What kind of stuff?”

“You know, things that seem a little out of the ordinary.” Should he be more explicit about what he was looking for, or would that be too leading and actually cause her to overlook things? “Maybe Drew’s mentioned something that seemed a little, you know, odd.”

Brenda narrowed her eyes and studied Sprue. “You’re up to something, aren’t you?”

Crap, she’s stonewalling. Sprue knew with absolute certainty that she and Lou must’ve talked. Damn that little goody-two-shoes of a Chaffee. Just like their ur-brother, always the Boy Scout.

“More curiosity than anything.” Sprue considered how to soft-pedal it so that Brenda didn’t go rat to her dad. The station was technically part of Engineering, even if IT did take care of a lot of its functions. “There’s been just enough things happening lately that make me think, hey, that’s odd, and I’ve been wondering if I’m the only one.”

“Probably not.” Brenda switched to that Very Grown-up Voice she used sometimes. “However, we are not supposed to be spreading rumors or engaging in unfounded speculation. Even when we’re not on the air, we need to uphold a professional standard.”

Make that definite, she was going to stonewall and nothing he said or did was going to get her to loosen up. Better wind this conversation up, because it was going nowhere and he did have his teaching responsibility tomorrow to prepare for.