Tag: Peter Caudell

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Narrative

No News Might Be Good News

Drew Reinholt was working his way through a new set of technical documents when he heard voices just outside his office door. He couldn’t make out words, but the tone and rhythms suggested distress, albeit carefully reined in. No doubt if he had been able to actually hear the words, he’d be too focused upon them to pick up that nuance.

Strictly speaking, even paying enough attention to notice the tension in the voices was a breach of privacy. Up here on the Moon, everyone was living in such tight quarters that it was liveable only if everyone studiosly avoided overhearing conversations that were not meant for them — although nobody would ever know if you did listen in as long as you never revealed it.

On the other hand, there were lots of ways of revealing information you weren’t supposed to have. Even so much as failing to show surprise at something could reveal that you must’ve come about knowledge in an illegitimate manner.

His thoughts were interrupted by a knock on the door. Back on Earth, he would’ve had to get up to open the door, but here he could just lean back and pull the door open. As long as it wasn’t a superior, his failure to rise to greet the person wasn’t a major breach of courtesy.

“Come on in.”

He was a little surprised to find Peter Caudell there. At least Captain Caudell wasn’t in his direct line of command, but the man was sufficiently senior in the list of astronaut selection groups that a certain amount of due deference was typically expected.

On the other hand, Caudell was also a clone of a Mercury astronaut, and familiar with the Shepard temperament. No, he wasn’t going to make an Issue of it.

Instead, he just leaned against the doorpost, taking an equally casual pose. “Say, Drew, have you heard any news about the situation down in Schirrasburg?”

“Not really. With their spaceport closed, I haven’t been keeping up that closely. I’ve got enough to do between studying for my latest training sequence,” he gestured to the documents on his computer, “and preparing for upcoming missions. Especially since they keep sending me down to Coopersville all the time.” Better stop there. It wouldn’t do to sound openly resentful about being unable to visit his family when Caudell’s wife and daughter lived here in the Roosa Barracks.

If Caudell picked up anything, he made no remark on it. “I’ve just heard some rumors. Some people claim the guy’s recovering and whatever he had, they’re pretty sure it wasn’t the diablovirus. Other people are saying he died but they’re covering it up to prevent panic.”

And you thought that Brenda being a DJ over at Shepardsport Pirate Radio would have her plugged into the information networks well enough that she’d know. Except there was no way to actually say that without being rude. “Unfortunately, I haven’t heard anything more authoritative, and with the current situation, I’ve been trying to keep my nose out of trouble.”

“Understood. But if you do come across something, let me know. I’m trying to reassure some people that we’re still safe, but the lack of solid information is only making them more likely to believe the worst rumors.”

“Will do.” With the conversation closed, Drew pointedly returned his attention to the material he needed to get absorbed before his next training session. After class, he’d consider whether he should contact Brenda and find out what she might know.

Or maybe he ought to contact one of his clone-brothers who happened to be one of Brenda’s colleagues at the station. That kid had a real nose for trouble, especially when he thought someone was hiding information from him.

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Narrative

Old Memories

This part of the Roosa Barracks dated all the way back to the beginning of humanity’s permanent presence on the Moon. No doubt one could argue that these were not in fact the original modules of that first American moonbase, for the simple reason that routine maintenance had pretty much replaced every component.

Still, it hadn’t kept NASA from deciding to put considerable effort into restoring everything to what it had looked like back in 1979 when the moonbase (there had only been one back in those days) had been established as a staging base for the first crewed mission to Mars. They wanted a regular little museum for the big celebrations around the fiftieth anniversary of the original lunar landing, so all the grandees and VIP’s could see the humble beginnings from which Grissom City had come.

Except they’d never appointed any staff to keep the museum. As a result, everyone out here had taken turns devoting some of their off hours to tending this little museum. For the younger pilots and ground crew, it had been something done out of a sense of obligation.

For Peter Caudell, coming here always brought a sense of nostalgia. Not that he’d actually seen the moonbase in its original configuration — he hadn’t come up here until the latter part of the 80’s, when the second Mars mission was coming back home. By then the place had expanded a fair amount, and there’d been some problems with the interconnections between the older and newer modules, which had created a near-disaster just when the Mars astronauts needed to be quarantined before going home to Earth.

It had been a different age, maybe not as wild and woolly as those early days of the Mercury astronauts, but still very much a frontier outpost from which home was very far away.

And now it may well be a refuge, if things are as bad as some reports seem to indicate. Or rather, the lack of reports.

In some ways the silences were almost worse than the information that was coming through. Not just the various Third World countries that had seemingly fallen off the grid altogether, although the reports of flyovers showing whole towns abandoned were disturbing. But on a more personal level, pretty much everyone up here had lost contact with one or more friends, colleagues or family members.

His own children and their families were safe — one of the back-handed benefits of the Expulsions, which had brought them up here to lunar exile. But his natal family was still back on Earth. His parents had both passed away shortly before the Expulsions, so they hadn’t had to watch those appalling events, but he had siblings and cousins with family scattered around the US, even abroad, and while he wasn’t constantly e-mailing or texting them, he did keep some contact through social media — and every now and then he’d think when did I last hear from that person?

Sometimes he’d become worried enough to actually look back and find it had only been a few days. Other times he’d find that more time had passed, and when he attempted to contact the person, he’d get a brief reply that the person was hanging on. He could only hope they weren’t canned replies, similar to the “out of office” replies some people set up in anticipation of a planned absence.

And that’s one of the most draining parts of this whole thing — the uncertainty. Risk can be managed — you don’t get into this line of work if you can’t deal with risk. It’s the damned uncertainty and ambiguity that is so crazy-making.

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A Worrying Development

The corridors of the Roosa Barracks were almost painfully quiet. Normally they would’ve been crowded with people coming and going through Slayton Field, but all that traffic had been disrupted, first with the diablovirus, and now with the solar storm watch, which had pretty much shut down all space traffic.

Which meant a very lonely walk back to the BOQ for Drew Reinholt. It didn’t help that there wasn’t that much to do in here. Because of the risk of contagion, gatherings were being discouraged — and what was the point in watching a movie or listening to a lecture on your computer in your private quarters? Maybe it would’ve been different with the family, but Brenda and the kids were at Shepardsport.

And maybe it’s just as well that way. If someone does bring the virus to the Moon, it’s far more likely to hit here. With luck, we can catch it quickly enough that it stops here.

On the other hand, the closing of space traffic was also meaning that freight wasn’t coming up, including essential items. As Drew walked past the Caudells’ apartment, he recalled a conversation he’d had with Peter Caudell earlier in the day.

Most essential parts could be fabricated up here, thanks to two decades of determined development of in-situ resource utilization. Everything that could be produced locally was that much that didn’t have to be lifted out of Earth’s substantial gravity well — which meant that even astronaut meals for the lunar ferry and stations in Earth orbit were grown and prepared in lunar greenhouse-farms.

However, there were still a few things that still needed to be brought up from Earth — some because there just wasn’t enough demand to justify the duplication of specialized equipment, and some biologicals because the relevant organisms required very particular environments. Most of them were medicinals, and there had been ongoing efforts to synthesize their active ingredients.

Which means that we’re depending on how long those things remain in stock. At least most of them aren’t life-or-death, but there are a few specialized seals and filters that we still don’t have the ability to fabricate up here.

Something we need to work on changing, ASAP.

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Narrative

A Little Bit of Good News

Peter Caudell was just settling into his office to review some new designs when there was a tap on the door frame. He looked up to find one of the guys from Medical standing there.

“Just wanted to let you know, that guy down at Schirrasburg has tested clean. Apparently he just picked up an ordinary stomach bug.”

“That’s good to know. So when do they reopen their spaceport? I’ve heard they’re having some supply problems down there.”

“They were ready to open it back up tomorrow, but Johnson wants them to wait three days and test him again. Apparently that test has a higher false-negative rate than the big brains like.”

Peter didn’t like the news — he had some friends stuck over there, and they’d been talking about basic stuff running short. Bad enough that there’d been a fight over a roll of toilet paper that left both guys in the brig for the night, and rumint said certain women would put themselves out for a vacuum-sealed packet of coffee.

However, he could also understand the need for caution. Even ordinary diseases like the common cold would sweep through an entire settlement every time it showed up. He remembered more than one incident from his first stay up here, back when he had new-minted gold wings and the Roosa Barracks was just “the moonbase.”

“Let them know that we’ll be ready to resume shipments as soon as we’ve got the all-clear.”

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Narrative

Be Careful What You Carry

The Roosa Barracks had become uncomfortably quiet of late. Drew Reinholt kept catching himself wanting to look over his shoulder whenever he walked down an empty corridor.

Sure, there were stories about certain parts of the Roosa Barracks being haunted by the ghosts of the astronauts who’d died in the 1996 disaster and whose bodies had been left there when the contaminated area had to be sealed off. But they were the sort of things you told newbies to see that frisson of fear, not something you actually took seriously.

He tried to tell himself it was just the absence of activity making his own thoughts too loud in comparison. And truth be told, he would be resting a lot easier if he could get more than sporadic text messages through to Brenda over in Shepardsport. So far what little had come through had been upbeat, and she hadn’t used any of the codes they’d agreed upon if something serious had happened.

On the other hand, he had no idea how many text messages might still be stuck in the system, waiting for an open connection between Farside and Nearside. Any of them might contain one of those warning codes, telling him he needed to read between the lines of what she’d written.

And it didn’t help that the news coming from Earth was getting worse all the time. Small countries in Africa and Asia had simply stopped communicating with the outside world, as if they’d fallen off the map. He was hearing RUMINT through the Air Force grapevine about overflights of villages full of unburied bodies, of other villages reduced to burned-out wreckage.

Of course those were places still struggling to get a toehold in the Twentieth Century, where poverty and ignorance were so common outside the major cities that even an American small town of the Revolutionary War would’ve seemed sophisticated and futuristic.

But even in wealthy countries, things were going from bad to worse. The most worrisome was the reports of flight control centers having trouble maintaining staffing. Just a few days ago, an old friend who’d gone back to Earth to work at Johnson had e-mailed him, saying that all the NASA space centers were going on full lockdown. Non-essential employees were to stay home, and essential employees were to stay in place, sleeping in makeshift accommodations on military cots.

And the Moon was only three days away from Earth, well within the incubation time of this new bug. All it would take would be one person breaking pre-flight quarantine on a lark — his own ur-brother had made an unauthorized jaunt just days before his Apollo flight — and they’d have it up here too. Somehow knowing that Mars was far enough away to be spared had proven cold comfort.

Especially since Shepardsport is still a lot more crowded. Even here in the Roosa Barracks, we have more room per person, and we’ve got the tightest quarters of anything here at Grissom City.

Even as he was considering that, a familiar voice called his name. He turned to face Peter Caudell. “What’s up?”

“Bad news.” Caudell looked worried. “We’ve just heard from the Indian Space Agency that they’ve had an accidental exposure. Apparently some of the support staff for their quarantine facility are daily commuters, and one of them has turned up sick — two days after their astronauts docked with Space Station Harmony and boarded the Sakura for the Moon.”

Although India had its own spacelift capability into Low Earth Orbit and its own lunar settlement, it paid Japan and the US for transport up here. Which meant their carelessness had now endangered not only Chandra Settlement, but also a good segment of Japan’s space infrastructure. And considering there was only a single station serving all nations on the lunar end–

“Have they gotten to Luna Station yet?” Drew tried not to think too much about the implications until he was certain. Still, cultures that focused too much on saving face had a tendency to cover up these sorts of problems, which had proved dangerous, even deadly, in the demanding environment of space. No one would ever forget what happened to Phoenix.

“At the moment they’re still a day out, and JAXA is still negotiating on how they’re going to handle it. So far, none of the Indian astronauts are showing any symptoms, but we can’t afford to risk any contact with anybody aboard the Sakura until everyone is past the longest possible incubation period. I’m also hearing some discussion of a strict quarantine for all pilots.”

“Damn, that’s going to suck. Shepardsport’s already confining visiting pilots to their port facilities. If we can’t visit at all–” Drew realized he was coming dangerously close to self-pity.

“It’s not just ports of call. They’re talking about closing off the Roosa Barracks and Slayton Field from the rest of Grissom City. Nobody in or out without a three-week quarantine.”

And Drew realized why Peter looked so worried. His daughter works up in the rodent labs. Either she has to change jobs or she has to find some place to stay in Grissom City for the duration.

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Narrative

Seeking Connection

It’s really sad when you’re listening to a disreputable Internet radio station just to hear your wife’s voice in one of the canned announcements. Drew Reinholt fiddled with his vTuner settings yet again, hoping yet again that it would connect with the Shepardsport Pirate Radio livestream. And it’s even sadder when you can’t.

Strictly speaking, there was no prohibition on the Slayton Field pilots listening to Shepardsport Pirate Radio, even in their offices when they were at work on their secondary astronaut specialties. But then Colonel Dyer knew better than give an order he knew would not be obeyed.

He pulled up the computer’s terminal and began doing some basic network tests. Although Drew wasn’t an IT specialist, or even an electrical engineer, he’d learned some basic network troubleshooting techniques over the years, especially back in the days when he was roaming the lunar surface with Dr. Schwartz.

He was able to ping the server, but only intermittently, which suggested that something was interfering with the transmission of packets. If there had been physical damage to the cables that ran alongside the ice train’s tracks, down to Coopersville and back north on Farside, it should’ve resulted in every IP address associated with Shepardsport simply disappearing from the Internet.

He recalled a long-ago leadership lecture about “rewarding intermittently” as a means of motivation. If someone were deliberately sabotaging Shepardsport’s connectivity, say with some kind of malware, might they allow just enough packets to go through to keep people trying to get through? Drew could think of several possible ways to create such an effect, although he knew he couldn’t describe them in sufficient detail to get IT to pay attention to him.

A tap on the door of his office brought him out of his ruminations. Drew looked up from his computer to find Peter Caudell standing there. “Hey, Drew, I know you’ve got family over at Shepardsport. Have you been having trouble making connections with them?”

“Damn skippy I have.” Drew knew he was being sharper than was politic with someone so senior, who’d done a hitch up here back in the days when the Roosa Barracks was just the moonbase. “Just this morning Brenda and I were going to FaceTime before she went on her air shift. Then it broke up and I wasn’t able to connect with her. I was hoping I could at least try to text her when we got back down, but by that time I couldn’t even get through on SMS.”

Peter nodded, concern drawing a furrow between his eyebrows. Even at his age he still had Scott Carpenter’s good looks — that was a geneset that aged well. “One of my clone-brothers over there has been having some problems. I’ve been checking in with him pretty regularly, trying to buck him up when things get particularly bad. Our last check-in should’ve been about four hours ago, and I haven’t been able to raise him at all.”

Drew nodded toward his computer with vTuner up. “Right now all I know is I can’t connect with Shepardsport Pirate Radio’s streaming service. I’ve been hesitant to contact IT about it because I don’t want to advertise that I listen to them. But I’m thinking it’s a lot more than just the digital radio stream getting cut off.” He looked straight into Peter’s eyes. “Maybe your word would have more weight than anything I could say.”

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A Little Less Conversation

Listening to Shepardsport Pirate Radio in your office could be tricky here in the Roosa Barracks, since Grissom City was still trying to stay cozy with the Administration. But Peter Caudell had enough family over there on Farside that he liked to keep it on, even if he had to keep the volume low or listen on headphones. Which was a lot easier these days than it had been back in the days before Bluetooth.

And right now he was just as glad he’d picked the completely private option, because something seriously strange was going on over there. For starters, they were playing way too much Elvis. It would’ve been one thing if this were a Sunday morning, because that was Payton Shaw’s program, the Church of the Blessed Elvis. Two hours of nothing but the Man from Memphis.

But today was a rather ordinary Tuesday. Everything he could see was showing ordinary levels of traffic in cislunar space, and the Sun was behaving itself quite nicely. None of the messy coronal mass ejections that seemed to be characteristic of a solar minimum and could wreck havoc with space activities.

So why did so many songs by Elvis Presley keep showing up on their playlist? Even in the Classic Rock program in the afternoon, Spruance Del Curtin tended to favor acts from the 70s and 80s, but today he’d played half a dozen Elvis songs.

And now that the disco program was on, Spencer Dawes was playing that cover of “A Little Less Conversation.” What was that band’s name? Something-or-other XL, Peter had never paid much attention because disco wasn’t his kind of music. Was it worth the risk to go online to the Shepardsport Pirate Radio website and check their official playlist?

Still, it bothered him just enough to be a persistent itch at the back of his mind. Maybe he ought to make a few discreet inquiries to his clone-brothers over there, see if any of them had heard anything. Too bad none of them had landed a position on the station staff, which was a shame when one considered Scott Carpenter’s fondness for music.

Worst case, there was always Payton Shaw. Sure, he was a Cooper, but the clones of the Mercury Seven did stick together.