Tag: Reginald Waite

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Narrative

The Spaces Between

Reggie Waite had been a little surprised to get the text from Autumn Belfontaine. Given the situation, he’d granted her pretty much a blank check to use her own judgement in covering the diablovirus pandemic. Which suggested that she’d found something she considered too hot to handle alone.

Which was why he’d told her to come up and talk with him rather than say that she shouldn’t worry about it. Trusting her judgment went both ways. If she said something was bigger than she wanted to handle on her own, it probably was.

So here she was, looking notably uncomfortable. Not nervous like someone being called on the carpet for some shortcoming, but like she had some seriously bad news to report and was trying to figure out whether to break it to him gently or just drop the bomb on him.

Reggie invited her to sit down, offered her coffee, which she politely declined. Now that the courtesies had been satisfied, he could get down to business.

“I understand you have some material you are concerned about releasing.”

Autumn handed him a USB stick, a completely unremarkable black shell of the sort that were cranked out by the million, so cheap they could be used for promotional purposes. “It has a number of video files that the Administration probably would find embarrassing, as well as some data files I believe they are deliberately suppressing.” She paused to consider what to say next. “Given their uncertain provenance, I thought it would be wise to run it past you before I put anything in the public view.”

The careful wording suggested she was protecting a source. Steffi had mentioned that someone had been visiting the dark side of the Internet. She’d been concerned mostly because of the disreputable sorts of porn one could find there, and the high risk that downloads could carry malware.

“I’ll look it over.” Reggie kept one computer specifically for examining questionable materials of this sort. Steffi had set it up specifically to have no connections to any other computer, and with some of the best anti-malware protections that didn’t require a specialist to use. “You might be able to help me sort through the files and identify the most relevant ones.”

It was a little awkward when she leaned over his shoulder to point out some file names, but he reminded himself that genetically she was his niece, the daughter of a clone-brother. Never mind that he and Lucius Belfontaine had never met — Reggie was still flying F-18’s off carriers when Belfontaine had died in the NASA Massacre — the connection was still very real.

Just focus on the material, not the person presenting it.

And Autumn knew those files up, down, sideways and backward. Not surprising for a news reporter. You had to be able to find the right file without a lot of wasted when your got back to the station and needed to file your report. Especially if you were prepping clips to play on air.

By the time Reggie had gone through the relevant material, he was shaken in a way he hadn’t been since the Kitty Hawk Massacre. “This is some pretty hot stuff. I think we’d better talk this over with Betty Margrave before we put any of it on the air. On second thought, let’s also have Dr. Thuc take a look at that epidemiological data.”

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Narrative

Remembered Days

The Science Department conference room felt ridiculously enormous for just two men to meet. However, Ken Redmond appreciated the choice of venue. Not just the fact that it was more spacious than either his or Reggie’s office, but the fact that it was neutral ground, so it didn’t have the emotional weight of meeting in either of their offices.

On the whole Reggie was a pretty laid-back commanding officer, especially for a Shep. Ken had heard plenty of stories about Alan Shepard’s management style as Chief Astronaut, even if those days had been long before his time. But when you went up to Reggie’s office, even to deliver a report rather than to answer for some fault in your department, there was always a sense of unease, of being on the spot. And when he came to your office, you always felt like your entire department was under the microscope.

Of course the real reason for them meeting here was the sophisticated 3-D A/V equipment Science had here. Equipment he needed for making his presentation on the innovative technique that might be able to produce replacement low-temperature bearings for the various cryo-pumps the settlement used.

Sure, he could’ve used the computer and monitor on his desk, maybe even offered the boss a pair of spex, but it wasn’t quite the same as having the images floating there on the tabletop, so real you’d think you could reach out and touch them. And right now, when he was asking for the boss to OK a huge departure from normal procedure, one that would involve changes in normal flight-certification procedures, he wanted the most persuasive presentation he could manage. Because he was really, really asking the boss to stick his neck out here.

Reggie arrived just as Ken was finishing his final checks on the equipment, making sure everything would show without any glitches. “So what are we looking at that’s so important we need the holoprojector system up here?”

Ken explained about the bearings. “Ever since NASA terminated the contract with McHenery and switched to Salwell, they’ve been wearing out about three times as fast, and we’ve been having no end of trouble maintaining our supply of spares.”

“Salwell? Wasn’t that part of North American Aviation?”

“North American bought them out during the build-up to the Space Shuttle program, and it got spun off again after Boeing bought out North American.”

That got a nod from Reggie. “I remember that now. Probably because they had more of the corporate culture problems than the guys from Seattle wanted to beat out of a new acquisition.”

“North American always had corporate culture problems. It goes way back to Apollo, and I’ve got it on good authority that you could scare them straight for a while after a bad accident, but it never solved the root problem, so it was always a matter of time before they’d start getting lax about the technical stuff. I honestly don’t understand why NASA kept going back to them when you couldn’t rely on them.”

“Because NASA’s a government agency, and therefore beholden to the bidding process.” Reggie leaned back in his chair, looking so much like Alan Shepard that Ken could completely understand how Wally Schirra could take a double-take at encountering him. “So North American underbids everyone else, gets the contract, and then ends up going over budget because half their work’s substandard. But the bean-counters only look at the up-front numbers, so NASA’s pretty much stuck. Get a bad enough accident and you might be able to shake things loose for a while, but then bureaucratic systems reassert themselves.”

A memory came back to Ken. He’d gone over to his ur-brother’s place to return some equipment, and was surprised to discover that Admiral Chaffee had come down to visit with his old boss. It would’ve had to have been some time in ’97, because President Dole had already nominated him as NASA Administrator but it hadn’t been officially confirmed by the Senate. However, he was already digging into the moonbase disaster, because he had brought a briefcase of papers with him and had them scattered about the table for Gus to examine.

Ken still remembered the admiral holding a sheaf of papers in one hand and whacking at them with the other as he made a point about unreliable contractors and nothing ever changing. It had been an awkward moment for a much younger man to have stumbled into such serious business — and Ken had not wanted to say or do anything that would have implied a criticism of Betty Grissom for sending him back here. So he’d stood there, making himself one with the wall as best he could, and got a ringside seat on the sorry story of the failures behind the disaster.

But was it really his story to tell here and now? He still remembered cringing at that horrible tell-all biography that had come out right after the admiral’s death.

No, telling that story added nothing to what he had to say. And they really needed to concentrate on his presentation now. Best to slide the conversation that way so he could lower the light level in here and get those holoprojectors running.

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A Piece of the Puzzle

Reggie Waite had been working his way through some documentation — supposedly from NASA HQ, although he had good reason to think most of the updates were from someone over at Grissom City. The bureaucratic gobbletygook was just thick enough that his eyes were glazing over when his phone rang.

Who was calling at this hour? Had the materials he was reading been more engrossing, he would’ve been tempted to just let it go to voicemail. Right now, the distraction was actually welcome.

As soon as he answered, he was glad he had, because it was Barbie Thuc down at Medlab. “I just got some news. Apparently we’ve been wrong about the diablovirus being natural.”

He recalled the presentation, way back when this whole mess started. “So what happened to all those inefficient gene-complexes a lab wouldn’t have used?”

“Everyone in the field assumed a whole lot more competence on the part of the people doing the work. The information is pretty sketchy right now, but we may have found the laboratory where that thing was put together. Or at least what’s left of it after the fire that drew the authorities’ attention in the first place.”

“Crap.” Reggie could see some pretty bad implications. Especially if they still had live cultures in there… “Any information on who or where?”

“As I said, we’re still working on sketchy information. But we do know it was a cabin up in the Alps, an old royal hunting box from back before World War I that had apparently been abandoned for a while because it was just historical enough that no one wanted to tear it down, but not historical enough to get maintained. From what I’ve heard, it’s in an area where there’ve been a lot of the really crazy deep-ecology types, the sort who regard humanity as a plague upon the Earth, inherently destructive, that sort.”

“Ayup, I remember the business with that one cult that had all holed up and all got found dead. Was there ever a definite decision on whether they thought they were going to be the sole survivors but ended up dead because they couldn’t operate a wood stove properly, or if they were trying to commit suicide to go to some perfect evergreen paradise?”

“That’s been a long time, and I was busy enough that I really didn’t read up on the literature. But you’re right, that’s the same area, so it’s possible we’re dealing with an offshoot from that apocalyptic cult. Right now I’m hearing that the local police, or what’s left of them, are trying to find someone with the authority to deal with it. Personally, I’m thinking they ought to get hold of Voronsky. He’s the man with the chops to understand whatever can be recovered from the computers and hardcopy files, but I could see how it could be touchy diplomatic going to get the Russians involved in Central Europe.”

“Very true.” Reggie was old enough to remember the Cold War, when it looked like Europe would always be divided by the Iron Curtain. “Keep me posted as this thing develops. And put Autumn Belfontaine in the loop. This may be something we want to get out, especially if anyone up here would have the background to be of any use.”

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Damage Control

Given the ever-increasing precariousness of the situation, Reggie Waite had started having his various section chiefs check in with him on a daily basis. Nothing in-depth, just touching base on anything that had changed, but the last thing he wanted to have happen now was to get blindsided by something because the early signs were overlooked. He remembered too many times that sort of thing happened during the Energy Wars.

Hell, they even had reasonably good intel that a terrorist attack on a NASA facility was in the works. They were just so certain that it was going to be the Space Shuttle that was launching for a secret DOD satellite repair mission that no one stopped to think that an attack on Johnson would be just as disruptive to the mission as an attack on Kennedy.

Right now he was talking with Bill Hearne. Mostly about the situation at Schirrasburg, or at least as much as anyone could find out with the settlement completely quarantined, its spaceport shut down and even overland deliveries such as the Ice Train prohibited. But Bill was also in regular communication with family on the old home place, which provided a line of information on just what was happening on Earth.

“Of course you have to remember that Fred and the rest of the family are pretty much staying on their farms as much as they can. It’s not like they’re going into town and chatting up the clerk at the feed store who talks to the truckers who get the gossip on the CB or at the truck stops.”

“Completely understood.” The last Reggie had heard from his family, they were all hunkering down too. He just wished they could get some messages up here, but given Chris was career Air Force, contact with someone at odds with the Administration might not be a wise move. “And quite honestly, gossip and rumint can be as much trouble as benefit in uncertain times like this. I’m receiving multiple reports of wild rumors going through the settlement right now, and a number of the kids getting frightened, having nightmares, the whole works.”

Bill started to laugh, turned it into a cough. “I think you can count Flight Ops out on that front, Captain. With all the pilots isolated from the rest of the settlement population while they’re in, and under minimal-contact orders while they’re on missions, it pretty much cuts them off as a source of gossip.”

“True, but I’m thinking more on getting some ideas about what we can do to keep this stuff under control. I spent most of the Energy Wars either at the Academy, which was buttoned up tight for security reasons, or at sea, where shore leave was pretty damned rare for the same reason. But you were already an astronaut, so you would’ve seen more of the way rumors go through a civilian population.”

“It’s been a long time, and I was pretty busy with training when I wasn’t actually on a mission or doing support work for someone else’s mission. But I’ll talk to Alice and see what she can remember.”

“Thanks. Let me know tomorrow what you can come up with. We need to get this situation under control, and soon.”

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Narrative

Lonely at the Top

Instead of taking section reports at a general meeting, rather like a corporate board meeting, Reggie Waite had decided to meat with each of his section heads privately. It meant fewer schedules to co-ordinate, and he could be more flexible about the time he allowed for each report. With things in such an odd state, he’d found that a lot of times one department had little or nothing to report while another had a lengthy report.

Right now he was talking with Alice Murchison from Agriculture. She’d reported on the ongoing repairs to the irrigation systems that had been compromised by defective tubing, and given her projections on the next cycle of harvests.

However, he also knew that she had some strong connections with the agricultural reporting system back on Earth, as well as more personal connections to the land. No doubt she did not see them as relevant to her work up here, so she’d not included them in her report. So he asked her directly what she knew.

Yes, the question caught her more than a little by surprise. It took her a fumbling moment to pull her thoughts together and relate what she had been reading from various agricultural reporting services she subscribed to. She openly admitted that the information had to be incomplete, for the simple reason that a lot of county offices and local grain elevators were shuttered as a result of the pandemic.

“In fact, I’d be just as ready to trust the anecdotal evidence I’m getting from our family dirtside. Bill and I both grew up on farms, and members of our families still own and operate them. Nephews and nieces for the most part, since our siblings have gotten to that age where they’ve pretty much retired from the day-to-day operations. But from what I’m hearing, they’ve all been able to maintain production as long as they can keep their equipment in good repair, but there’s a lot of question about getting the food to market. According to Bill’s brother, they’ve had to dump milk as often as they’ve been able to get the milk truck out there to pick it up. Apparently there’s been a quiet sort of exchange with the neighbors, but strictly speaking, they could lose their Grade A certification if anyone official were to find out.”

“Understood.” Reggie considered some of the stopgaps they’d used in the first weeks and months after the Expulsions began, when they had to find some way to absorb all the new people and keep them breathing. “What about your family?”

“We were always grain farmers. Winter wheat, mostly, with a side of short-season soybeans to maintain soil nitrogen levels. So it’s not quite the same issue as a dairy farm has, but my niece and her husband have apparently been having trouble getting fuel deliveries. There’s some real question of what’s going to happen if they can’t get the crops harvested for want of diesel fuel to run the combines and the tractors to pull the grain wagons. Thankfully we never got quite to the point where we switched to custom harvesting, because I’ve heard a lot of farmers are discovering they can’t line up anybody, and they just don’t have the equipment to do it themselves. We could be looking at a situation where there’s ample food in the fields, but it rots for want of the wherewithal to harvest it.”

“Like something out of the old Soviet Union.” Reggie recalled some of the things he’d heard, of the problems that lingered even a decade or more after the end of central planning, simply because access to resources remained so uneven. “And we’re going to have a ringside seat to the consequences, and not a damned thing we can do about it up here at the top of the gravity well.”

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Narrative

Is No News Good News?

Reggie Waite was coming to dread these meetings with Dr. Thuc. Although she continued to report that the lunar community had been able to keep the diablovirus at bay, the news from Earth just kept getting worse and worse.

After delivering the latest litany of bad news, Dr. Thuc added, “However, we must be careful to remember the rule about absence of evidence. We cannot assume that regions that are not reporting information are necessarily charnel houses. While it’s true that some of the earliest warning signs came in the form of reports from travelers of entire villages found desolate, even then it didn’t mean every inhabitant had died. There is some evidence of survivors deciding their numbers were simply too small to sustain a village, and leaving in search of a community that could support them. In fact, there is some speculation that such migration played a significant role in the early spread of the diablovirus.”

“And given how poor record-keeping was in those parts of Earth even before the current crisis, we’ll probably never know.” Reggie considered the situation, trying to push back the old memories from the Energy Wars. “I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some of those ass-end-of-nowhere places were still functioning at some minimal level, but nobody knows about it because the communications net is so thin they hardly notice when it goes down. There’s even some places in the US that are like that, out in Alaska, up in the Rockies, heck, even up in the mountainous parts of New England.”

“That’s completely possible. On the other hand, it appears that a surprising number of areas are keeping things operating by various ad hoc solutions as things break down and repair parts aren’t available.” Dr. Thuc flipped through a number of files in her tablet. “I have several reports of hospitals jerry-rigging repairs to generators and other vital equipment when normal spares couldn’t be found.”

“That’s good to know. However, I’m wondering what’s happening outside the medical field. How many factories are still in operation, and of the ones that weren’t, how many were properly shut down before they were abandoned? Ken Redmond would know this sort of stuff better than I do — he’s the mechanical engineer — but I remember from some of my coursework at Annapolis that there are a lot of processes that you can’t just terminate with the flip of a switch. A lot of chemical plants could be in a bad way if the operators weren’t able to execute an orderly shutdown before they lost power for good, or didn’t have enough personnel to continue operations.”

“That’s really out of my area of expertise. But I certainly can appreciate your concerns. The issue has certainly gone through my mind. However, given that there’s not a lot we can do about that situation right now, my primary focus has been on determining what we’re going to be looking at in terms of rebuilding when all of this is over.”

“And that’s all any one of us can do at the moment. Other than getting information out via Shepardsport Pirate Radio, we pretty much have to concentrate on keeping contagion out and keeping our own systems running.”

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From the Top

Reggie Waite usually ran Shepardsport with a relatively light hand. He picked division heads who knew their lines of work and trusted them to pick subordinates who were competent in their own areas, and to generally run their respective divisions without needing to be micromanaged.

However, there was always the occasional matter that really needed to be seen in person. And the news from Agriculture was just one of those kinds.

Alice Murcheson always made him think of some of the older women at church when he was growing up back in Salem. Not just the graying hair and the smile lines at the corners of her eyes, but also a certain maternal air about her that made a person feel at home.

Today those lines were downturned, and the atmosphere around her was filled with an uneasy tension. “We were lucky we discovered the problem at all. All the indicators were showing adequate flow, so we assumed everything was fine.”

Reggie looked from Alice to the image of the affected greenhouse, the people in breathing gear carrying buckets of water to the affected plantings. “And with the carbon dioxide levels you’re running in those greenhouses, there’s a big temptation to just trust your readouts.”

Alice nodded, her expression regretful. “We ought to be doing more frequent inspections of all the plantings, but until we can get a lot more people through oxygen-delivery training and able to use breathing rigs–” She left the sentence hanging.

Reggie understood the problem all too well. The Expulsions had enormously expanded the population of Shepardsport, primarily in the younger age cohorts. Although some of the kids were finally getting old enough to qualify for the necessary training, it still was behind the numbers they needed to properly inspect all the plantings necessary to feed the settlement’s population and keep up with their obligations to provide prepared meals to the various outposts scattered around Farside. The kids could teleoperate inspection robots, but even with spex and haptic feedback gloves, it was still far too easy to miss things.

Especially if it’s not something you’ve been trained to look for, which is what Ken Redmond thinks happened. Reggie had all too many memories of such situations back in the Energy Wars. The Navy — heck, the whole freaking Department of Defense — was pushing people through their training programs way too fast, which meant a lot of people with surface facility with the skills and techniques, but no deep understanding of the underlying principles. Even his own flight training had been horribly rushed by peacetime standards, and he’d learned a heck of a lot on the job.

But there was no use dwelling on how close things had been three decades ago. Right now, they needed to deal with the current problem, so they could get these highly-skilled people back to the jobs where they were really needed.

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Of Deep Space and Deep Time

The air in Reggie Waite’s office felt oddly stuffy. One look at the panel of the life-support systems monitor told him that everything was nominal: temperature, pressure, partial pressures of oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide. Even humidity was well within normal range.

Which meant that it was psychological. Probably because he was trying to sort through the data Dr. Doorne had sent him, and even with all her annotations, he was still finding it heavy going.

She’d had one of her junior TA’s run it up here, mostly because she was helping supervise the effort to relocate or harden the electronics in the upper levels — when she wasn’t helping put together procedures for all the various outlying settlements and research outposts that were associated with Shepardsport but had their own command.

Quite honestly, he couldn’t blame her. Solar astronomy was not her specialty, and her choice of data reflected her much stronger background in deep-space objects, and the use of statistical techniques to study massive amounts of radio data from them. It made more sense for her to concentrate on her EE skills, which could help with the more immediate issues of protecting their equipment from overloads and damage if they did get hit with a major solar storm. Even shutting down might not necessarily protect equipment from an X-level CME, especially if it were to induce system-generated EMP in the wiring. During the Carrington Event of 1859, disconnected telegraph lines had still transmitted messages as a result of such induction.

The data Dr. Doorne had sent was not for the Sun. Instead, she had selected a wide variety of G-class stars of comparable age to the Sun, all going through similar activity levels to a solar minimum. She’d highlighted certain patterns in the data, particularly related to frequency of flares and magnetic storms associated with what few starspots those stars were having.

Which looks very much like we’re going to be in for a wild ride for the next month or two. Right while Earth is still in disarray from the ongoing diablovirus pandemic and effectively unable to help us if we lose anything vital.

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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

Bad News Keeps Coming

The entire dining commons had gone silent as Captain Waite presented the situation. There’d usually be some whispering in the back of the room, the soft sounds of people shuffling their feet or shifting their weight in their chairs. But the only background noise Spruance Del Curtin could hear was the soft whir of the ventilation system.

Everything the commandant said was meshing with what Sprue had seen while working his way through all those statistics of Dr. Doorne’s, everything Chandler Armitage had told him as they discussed possibilities. Although the largest lunar settlements had developed enough industry in the last decade that they could make most of the things they needed, there were a few very specialized things that still had to come from Earth. Biologicals for the most part, especially some medicines, but certain devices and spare parts for others, simply couldn’t be produced with the equipment available up here.

However, the real chokepoint was going to be capacity. Yes, Shepardsport or Grissom City or any of the other big settlements could produce a lot of the parts that weren’t coming up here — but could they produce them fast enough to keep up with demand?

Which meant that a lot of things were going to have to be made to stretch a lot longer. It probably wouldn’t be as tight as those first few weeks and months after the Expulsions, when Shepardsport had to accommodate a sudden expansion of its population, right to the limits of their life support systems’ capacity, where they moved from crisis to crisis, finding ways to eke out just a little more capacity.

But it would mean a lot more work for everyone at the station. New public service announcements to record, and all of them would probably be pressed into service, not just the news crew. Especially if Captain Waite wanted to record some of his own, since that meant setting up the recording studio. With pressurized space at a premium, the station couldn’t justify a permanent recording studio when they might do one pre-recorded show a month.

But we’ll find a way to do it, somehow.