Categories
Narrative

Indecision

Spruance Del Curtin looked at his phone, trying to decide what to do. So Drew wanted him to get answers about the situation in Schirrasburg, right when he was getting told that Command was taking notice of his curiosity, and not in a good way.

Should he contact Autumn Belfontaine, express interest in taking her up on that offer to put him on the news team? Except he really didn’t like the idea of having to give up being a DJ.

Who else could he talk to? A lot of times he’d ask Brenda, but she was Drew’s wife and Ken Redmond’s daughter, and Sprue wouldn’t be surprised if she told both of them that he’d asked her. Drew might be amused at having his own question come full circle, but Sprue was pretty sure that Ken was the one that sent Lou Corlin to make those passive-aggressive remarks last night.

However, Sprue did have a reasonably good rapport with Chandler Armitage. Not close, given that they were both Sheps and there was always a certain edge of competitiveness in any interaction between them. But if Sprue played his cards right, Chandler might just take the question as a challenge and plunge right into the search for the answer with all the determination of a terrier digging out its prey.

On the other hand, did he really want to discuss it over an insecure channel like SMS when it was clear that very senior people were taking an interest in his activities, and not in a good way? In normal times he might’ve found an excuse to go down to Flight Ops and see if Chandler was in his office. When you had lineage rights, there were plenty of ways to make the connection without catching flack about it.

Maybe sent a carefully worded text, to avoid making it too clear why he wanted to talk, and see if Chandler was at least in town. In the meantime, he had studying to do, and at least the latest lesson packet in his statistical analysis class would keep his mind too busy to fret.

Categories
Narrative

At the Bottom of the World

Chandler Armitage had gotten reasonably used to the BOQ at the Roosa Barracks, to the point where he hardly needed to think about most of the things he needed to do for an overnight stay. His nutritional profile and food preferences were in the kitchen database, so there was little chance of a mixup resulting in the deliverybot presenting him with something inadequate or completely unacceptable. The WiFi password was in the keychains of all his devices, so logging on was a single click and he could catch up on his studies or surf the Web in search of entertainment. Quite honestly, it wasn’t all that much difference from being back home in Shepardsport, now that the pilots were all being quarantined from the general population of settlements.

Now he’d just drawn a flight down here to Coopersville. Something to do with the mess in Agriculture, from some things Colonel Hearne had said in the briefing. In normal times he would’ve known all about it, simply by talking to people, but being confined to Flight Ops was keeping him in the dark about most of what was going on in his own home settlement. Sure, he was picking up some stuff from listening to Shepardsport Pirate Radio, but he had a feeling that Autumn Belfontaine had been told to keep a lid on the situation for the moment. Which suggested something seriously bad.

Might as well take a look at his e-mail, see if there was anything of interest. At least cleaning it out would take up some time. Not as much as usual, since a lot of the aviation and astronautics lists were a lot quieter. He hoped their usual participants dirtside were just too busy with relief efforts, not down with the diablovirus or worse.

Some stuff in from the settlements on Mars, from the looks of the headers. Not surprising, since Mars was far enough away to provide an automatic quarantine for anyone going out there from the Earth-Moon system. As long as the settlements there remained free of the diablovirus, life would continue as usual. All of them would have stockpiles of essential supplies, including spares for vital equipment, sufficient to last for at least a few years, so they would have time to work out long-term solutions. Which meant that the people there would have at least some breathing room, and thus some time to relax and chew the fat online.

And then he saw a subject line he’d given up hope on ever seeing. It was a quote from one of Robert Frost’s less well-known poems, a verse that he and his mother had agreed upon as a code way back when he headed off for the Naval Academy and had to face the possibility that e-mail would be censored.

Could his mother have survived after Flannigan’s goons disappeared her in the wake of the disastrous 2012 election? She’d been one of the few governors to offer any substantial resistance to Flannigan’s increasingly hostile measures against clones and people with genetic modifications (two sets with a great deal of overlap), and they’d pretty much assumed that she’d caught a bullet in the back of the head, probably in the basement of a Federal building somewhere.

Hardly daring to hope, Chandler clicked on the e-mail. Would it be a message from his mother?

If it was a message, it wasn’t in the clear. Instead, it was just a poem by Emily Dickenson. The one about clover and bees, which wasn’t any agreed-upon message.

On the other hand, it wasn’t the one about death stopping, which would’ve meant she was definitely gone. Which meant there was hope — but hope could be almost worse than knowing. Where had he read that line about hurting a man who’s lost everything by giving back something broken?

Categories
Narrative

Gain One, Lose One

The corridors leading down to the port facility were unusually quiet. Normally they would’ve been bustling with activity, and there was a good possibility he’d be stuck at one or another airlock, waiting for someone to bring a large piece of equipment through.

However, these were not ordinary times. With the restrictions on travel, shipping had been reduced to only essential materials. Food and Nutrition was still shipping cases of prepared astronaut meals to the small science outposts scattered about Farside, as well as some of the smaller mining outposts that didn’t have enough people to maintain a Zubrin hobby farm. Engineering was still fabbing parts for equipment at those outposts, especially when spares simply weren’t available, whether because the manufacturer had ceased to support something or shipments from Earth had been cut off.

But compared to the usual volume of material traveling through these lower corridors, right now there was almost nothing. In fact, from some of the things his clone-brothers had told him, operations had been reduced to the point that some of the more junior pilot-astronauts were having to fight for enough missions to maintain their flight status. Not to mention the financial consequences of losing one’s flight pay.

Not as serious a problem over here, where things were still run like a research station or a ship at sea. But at Grissom City and Coopersville, which were transitioning toward a civilian economy, it could be awkward for the pilot-astronauts who had apartments rather than living in the BOQ.

On the other hand, the shortage of missions meant that Chandler Armitage was going to be sticking around for a while. Which meant that it might be possible to pull him in on this project — but Sprue also knew that he’d have to be extremely careful about how he went about it.

Sprue was just exiting the airlock that joined Innsmouth Sector when his phone buzzed. Not a text chime, not a mail beep, but an alert tone that was used only for emergency communications.

Not a good thing to hear when they were in the middle of a solar storm watch. He didn’t think that it would be upgraded to a warning this quickly, although he doubted that they’d be so lucky as to have it turn out to pass by the Moon without causing any trouble. The best they’d probably get would be a near miss with low enough radiation counts that only flights and EVA’s would be suspended, but ordinary activty within the settlement would continue.

When he pulled out his phone, he saw the push notification. As it turned out, it was just a general alert for a couple of long-term EVA’s that weren’t reporting in. Both of them were based out of nearby outposts that were nominally under Shepardsport’s command, but were effectively autonomous. Some of the commercially-owned outposts were a bit lax about certain safety protocols, and according to some things Carl Dalton had mentioned, Betty Margrave had had words with their people more than once.

On the other hand, it wasn’t something Sprue needed to worry about, so he cleared it and continued on his way. If those teams were still an issue by the time he did tomorrow’s air shift, he might have to read announcements about it.

However, he doubted it would be an issue. Most likely, if they hadn’t reported in within the next few hours, someone would be tasked to fly out and search for them. Of course their companies would be charged for the search and rescue flight, so they had an incentive to make sure their people got back in before things reached that point.

Better to put the whole thing out of his mind. He needed to concentrate his mind on how he was going to present the situation to Chandler. Especially since he really wasn’t supposed to go blabbing about this stuff, so he had to find ways to talk about it without being obvious.

Categories
Narrative

A Promised Meeting

Getting back to Shepardsport had proven harder than Chandler Armitage had anticipated. He’d been supposed to fly straight back, but just as he was heading down to do the final checks on his lander, he’d gotten the word that he was needed to take some parts and supplies out to a minor outpost that had experienced a critical failure. Yes, they did have backup systems, but those systems are like a spare tire on a car. They’re designed to carry you far enough to get your primary systems repaired or replaced, no more.

At least the people at the outpost had the necessary skill sets to do the repair on their own, so the delivery was just a matter of using a robot to set the boxes out on the lunar regolith. The settlers had send their own robot out to retrieve them, and all communication had been via radio. Neither Chandler nor his pilot had needed to get out of the lander, let alone enter the outpost’s habitat.

In the old days — had it only been a few months? Already it felt like an eternity ago — they probably would’ve been welcomed inside, maybe even fed supper and invited to stay overnight to rest. Most modern outposts had a sufficiently elastic oxygen budget that they could extend hospitality to the occasional visitors. It wasn’t just a matter of building in redundancy to absorb shocks, although that was an important engineering principle. There was also the human factor, the need to make connections with the larger world at a personal level, not just voices on a speaker and images on a screen.

A problem that remained even now that he was home — or at least as much home as this settlement could ever be. He still felt homesick for his native New Hampshire, and wondered what had become of his mother when President Flannigan had cracked down on the Granite State’s resistance to his policies against clones and replaced her with a governor of his own choosing.

It always comes back worst when I’m not busy. He considered that thought. Normally he would have plenty to occupy himself. Not just his professional duties, overseeing the maintenance of his lander, keeping himself up to date on training and his secondary specialty, but also social activities here or in whatever settlement he was visiting.

But the current crisis meant that last was no longer an option. He understood why it was necessary for the pilots to stay down here, away from the rest of the settlement. Hell, some of the scuttlebutt he was hearing from his old flying buddies from his carrier days was downright terrifying. But the loss of his usual diversions made it altogether too easy to brood.

On the other hand, he did have some unfinished business to take care of. Although he’d been raised in a regular family — or as regular as a family can be when one parent is a senior politician — he appreciated the importance of astronaut lineages among his clone-brothers who’d grown up in the NASA clone creche.

Yes, there was Spruance Del Curtin’s text. Might as well see if he was where he could talk about whatever the data was that was bothering him so much.

Categories
Narrative

A Dangerous Mystery

Chandler Armitage was really wondering whether he’d made a mistake in not telling Spruance Del Curtin to find someone back at home to get his ass out of whatever bear trap it had gotten caught in. But Sprue was his clone-brother, which made it harder to refuse.

A little texting back and forth had enabled Chandler to determine that Sprue was dealing with some statistical material that had really upset him. However, it was also becoming obvious that Sprue was acting almost entirely on intuition. He had no idea what the numbers in front of him were actually representing — and reading between the lines, it sounded very much like he wasn’t supposed to know.

Are you sure you really ought to be discussing this with me?

Probably not, but I know Dr. D won’t answer any questions. And you’re the only other person I know with a strong background in data processing and statistical analysis.

True. Are you where I could call you? I think this is something we may need to discuss in realtime.

Right now I’m in Dr. D’s office. I can hear her talking with someone in the department office, but she could come back here any time.

Now that definitely complicated matters. How long does she usually stay in the departmental offices?

Totally depends. Earlier today she was down at FSOT, dealing with some problem with their imaging systems. Apparently she had to spend the whole trip suited up so she wouldn’t have any contact with the commander and pilot of the suborbital hopper.

That’s getting pretty much standard. OTOH, if this isn’t super-urgent, it might be better to wait until I get back to SP tomorrow. Even if we have to talk through a moonglass window, it may be better to discuss this face to face.

I’ll see what I can manage.

Categories
Narrative

No Night on the Town Today

There were some definite advantages to being a pilot-astronaut, Chandler Armitage decided. He liked being able to get around, in more ways than one.

However, right now a big chunk of that was pretty well negated by the current quarantine rules. In normal times he always looked forward to getting assigned a flight to Grissom City. Although pilot-astronauts were supposed to stay in the Roosa Barracks, the external habitat on Slayton Field, he could usually finagle a pass to the main settlement, enjoy at least a little of the night life.

Not all of it, because he sure as heck couldn’t pay tourist prices on a Navy officer’s budget. And while he was a silent partner in several business ventures, none of them were overwhelmingly lucrative, and being seen as too free a spender could result in awkward questions. But in general he could count on being able to pick up a pretty girl and show her a good time.

Not now, that was for certain. Heck, he couldn’t even go meet some of his old friends here in the Roosa Barracks. Nope, the rule now was if you weren’t in your lander, you were to stay in your assigned transit quarters. Meals would be brought by robot, and unless physical interaction was essential, all meetings were via teleconference.

Another guy might’ve taken a look around the Internet to see just how far Rule 34 would stretch. Chandler had discovered sometime in his teens that, once the allure of the forbidden wore off, smut got boring. For him, the thrill lay in the chase, in the winning rather than the having.

Pretty faces were a dime a dozen up here, especially in Tourist-Town, and there were a lot of women who seemed to think it was some kind of attainment to get laid by a pilot-astronaut. Sometimes he wondered how many of them would have guessed that they would’ve stood a far better chance of actually interesting him if they’d been a little stand-offish instead of throwing themselves at him like he were a water fountain in the middle of the Mojave.

But right now every last one of them was out of reach. The tourist trade was shut down — no tour operator was going to take the risk of launching, no matter how good their pre-flight quarantine procedures might be. The Indian Space Agency mess showed just how easy it was for a single commuting worker to transmit this virus, whether directly to one of the astronauts or via an intermediary contact with a support staff member who was staying on-site. And while some of the tourists who’d made it up here were stuck until return flights could be arranged for them, all those people were being confined to their transit quarters for the duration.

Which left him with damned little to do. There was only so long you could stare at stuff on a screen before you got sick and tired of it. And what exercise was possible in the confines of this tiny room got tedious too.

The ding of his phone’s text chime pulled him out of his thoughts. He retrieved his phone, read the lock screen. What was Spruance Del Curtin doing sending him a text right now? Not that the kid didn’t have lineage right, but what was so important that he should be the first person Sprue would contact?

Categories
Narrative

Of Distance and Difficulty

Autumn Belfontaine had plenty of experience in doing interviews. One of her very first assignments as a reporter at the U of Minnesota student radio station had been to get man-on-the-street interviews at a political rally.

However, she was used to being able to talk with her interviewee face to face. Sure, radio was an audio-only medium, so the listeners weren’t losing anything. But as an interviewer, she really liked to be able to see the other person, gauge their reactions to her questions in a way she couldn’t when she had nothing but a voice on the other end of a telephone line. And no, videoconferencing technology didn’t really substitute for being in the same room with a person and being able to look them in the eyes.

Having it be someone she knew should’ve made it easier, but somehow she was finding it much harder. It didn’t help that she and Chandler Armitage had a rather complicated relationship. Genetically speaking, he was her uncle, since he was her father’s clone-brother. But they were so close in age that he felt more like the brother she never had.

Which is no excuse. You’re a professional, so act like it.

Still, there was no denying that things simply weren’t clicking, and it wasn’t just because the assignment had been sprung on her with almost no time to prepare. She was supposed to be getting his insights on the situation from his experience as a pilot flying to various settlements, but all his responses sounded stiff, even canned.

At least this is a recorded interview, not something we’re doing live. With luck, he’ll loosen up. Worst case, we 86 the whole thing.

Autumn was so tightly focused on it that she almost didn’t hear the tapping on the door. When she did, she turned to see who could be interrupting her. At least coming in on a recorded interview wasn’t like barging into the DJ booth while the DJ was on air — they could edit out such interruptions.

To her surprise, it wasn’t the music director, or the sales director, or even the general manager, but Ken Redmond himself. When the Chief of Engineering shows up at your door, you’d better answer, ASAP.

“Commander Armitage, we’re going to need to wind this up.”

At least he was understanding, but it still felt awkward to cut things short. And even more awkward after the call was completed, to go out there and see what Ken needed.