Tag: Spruance Del Curtin

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Narrative

Peering into the Mists of Time

Spruance Del Curtin didn’t usually go down to IT to talk with Lou Corlin. But after Dr. Doorne had given him a totally new group of data sets, he wanted to talk to Lou where they’d have ready access to the heavy iron.

Especially if this is part of something that IT’s processing.

Lou was back in one of the big server rooms, busy at a terminal of some sort. He looked up as soon as Sprue walked in.

Lou’s dark eyebrows drew down in a scowl. “Who sent you back here? This area is supposed to be authorized personnel only.”

Sprue jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the corridor. “The girl out front said you were back here. She didn’t say anything about having to wait while she got you.” He pointedly didn’t add that he’d spent several minutes flattering her before asking Lou’s whereabouts, buttering her up so she’d be more likely to let him through.

“Dang, Julie’s brand new down here. You do realize you may have just gotten her in a whole lot of trouble, if Steffi comes around and finds you back here with me. These are supposed to be secure servers that handle sensitive information. They don’t even have direct Internet connections. If we have random people coming and going, we don’t have secure servers any more because someone could just help themselves to the data.”

“Crap. I didn’t realize it was that big a deal. I just wanted to ask you about some data Dr. Doorne was having me work on. The stuff she had been having me go through is pretty clearly demographic, and I think it has something to do with the pandemic. But this stuff is completely different. I mean, the fundamental structure of the data is different.” Sprue described some of the variables that he’d been working with.

“That sounds like astronomical data. The drives that came in from Mars on the Soryu must’ve finally cleared quarantine and been cleared–“

“Data from Mars? What would she be doing with that? I mean, she’s a radio astronomer, not a planetary geologist.”

“Hasn’t she told you anything about her work? She’s one of the principal researchers in a big study that’s using FSRA and the new radio array on Mars as a truly gigantic baseline radio telescope. It’s a really complicated thing that has to adjust for general and special relativity to pull all the data together, so her background in signals analysis is absolutely critical. They’re hoping to be able to detect objects further away than ever before, and thanks to the speed of light, that means further into the past. If they’re right, they may be able to sort the last echoes of the first few mintues after the Big Bang from the cosmic background radiation from the Big Bang itself, and determine if the universe is actually part of a multiverse of universes that interact at the quantum level.”

“Wow. That sounds pretty cool.”

“Which is why you’d better get out of here, now, if you don’t want to get kicked off all her projects with a big fat black mark on your permanent record. Come over to our module lounge after supper tonight and I’ll tell you more.”

Although Sprue didn’t like being dismissed, especially not by a clone of a member of the third astronaut selection group, he could tell that persisting would only risk attracting attention. So he took his leave as gracefully as he could manage, hoping it wasn’t too obvious just how intense a curiosity was burning inside his mind right now.

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Narrative

A Reprieve — or Maybe Not

There was something vaguely satisfying about the afternoon receptionist coming in early. Maia might not be a stunning beauty, but she was reasonably pretty, if tending more to the cute, and most important, unlike Cindy, she wasn’t family. She belonged firmly in the McDivitt lineage, and nobody was going to complain about a Shep being interested in her.

Of course Sprue couldn’t be too blatant about his interest in her, and not just because they both worked here at the station. With the tension of a solar storm watch, excessive levity was not appreciated around here. He’d already gotten some sharp words about treating the girls in his class like capture targets in a dating sim, and he really didn’t want to get the same static here.

“You’d think that things would start loosening up now that the CME just barely grazed us. Radiation levels hardly went up, even in the most exposed areas like the observatory.”

Sprue considered how to answer that. Dr. Doorne had told him a few things about the unsettled state of the Sun’s magnetic field, but he wasn’t sure just how much was for general consumption. Especially considering that some of it was technical enough that he wasn’t sure that he could explain it properly, and mixing things up was a good way to get stupid rumors going. He hadn’t forgotten the times when he’d tried to catch a girl’s interest by showing off insider information, only to get things mixed up badly enough that he made a fool of himself.

And then he looked over at the clock, realized just how swiftly the time had gone by while he was chatting her up. “It’s complicated, and you’d probably do better asking someone in Astronomy. If you want, I can connect you up with my boss there. Right now, I’ve gotta go.”

Maia might not be an on-air personality, but she understood one critical principle of broadcasting: you were not late to start your air shift, ever.

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Battening the Hatches

Spruance Del Curtin was winding up the day’s work for Dr. Doorne. Now that he knew what the data represented, and why certain types of data tended to move in tandem, what he was seeing was very worrisome.

If this goes on, what will even be left? Already some countries were no longer reporting data, and were having to be dropped from the analysis. Most of them were small countries in Africa, but there were some in South America and in Asia.

Others were hanging on in spite of taking a beating. The US was a big country, with lots of depth of field to absorb blows, but Japan and even Israel remained functional, albeit struggling under the weight of enormous losses.

Sprue recalled his conversation with Cindy Margrave — when had that been? — about Colonel Hearne’s discussion in class about trust, and about how levels of trust were so critical in determining how well a society would function, particularly when under strain. Of course the colonel was recalling the Energy Wars — although he was already a veteran astronaut by that time, he knew more than a few people who’d served in the Middle East during that time — but current events were certainly playing out that argument in real time.

Just as he was doing the final checks on the data, Dr. Doorne walked in. “Statistics class is canceled for today. I just got word that Engineering and IT are beginning a special effort to increase the hardening on our electronics in the upper levels against a worst-case solar storm.”

Not surprising when one considered she held an advanced degree in electrical engineering as well as astronomy — one of the big reasons she was up here, rather than down on Earth. “Do you really think we’ll have a storm bad enough to do that kind of damage?”

“It’s hard to say. However, we are clearly moving into a historic solar minimum, and there is strong evidence both from history and from studies of other G-class stars of similar age in the galactic neighborhood that the incidence of these sorts of events actually increase during these periods. There’s a lot of speculation about stellar dynamo magnetodynamics, but to put it in layman’s terms, we think that sunspots actually serve to relieve the strain, rather like small earthquakes on a fault line.”

Sprue recalled some things that Juss Forsythe and Spencer Dawes had said about studying in California. “And if there aren’t any for a long time, when the fault does move, it’s a big one.”

“Exactly. Although we have a much better grasp of the mechanics involved in earthquakes, for the simple reason that seismologists have a lot of faults to study, and we astronomers have only one Sun. Until recently, we simply didn’t have the technology to study other stars at the level of detail we needed to even make educated guesses at how their internal dynamics compared to that of our own.”

It sounded very much like she was about to launch into a story of the state of astronomy when she was working on her PhD. Sprue didn’t need to be told to know the technology she was talking about would be the radio and optical telescopes right here on Farside.

Not to mention that he couldn’t linger here. “Um, Doc, I’ve only got an hour to get down to the dining commons and grab lunch, and then get to the station and start my air shift.”

“Right, of course. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He could hear the unspoken assuming we don’t have further schedule changes as the situation develops. And given that his work with Engineering was now having him liaison with IT, there was a good probability he’d be roped into this task too.

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Narrative

Evening Thoughts

Lou Corlin was just finishing reviewing some notes on his current training sequence when he noticed the module airlock cycling and someone entering the lounge. He looked up just as a Shep walked in.

What are you up to now, Sprue?

Spruance Del Curtin just flashed him that big Shepard grin that could be annoying or amusing. “I thought I’d find you up here. Brenda having you watch her kids again?”

“Actually, they’re visiting Grandma tonight.”

Sprue leaned forward a little, interested. “So she’s over at her mom’s?”

“No.” Lou stopped, realizing it might not be the wisest thing to just tell Sprue just where Brenda had gone. “Did something come up at the station that you need to talk about?”

“Actually, no. Drew just texted me. He’s worried because she hasn’t answered his texts.”

“Got it. I see why he’d want you to check around.” Lou considered how much to tell him. “From what she said, her dad wanted to talk to her privately. Apparently something about the space weather situation.”

“Right. And it probably wouldn’t be too wise to nose in on her. So I’ll just let Drew know that his wife is in a private conference and probably has her phone switched to vibrate. Thanks.”

“No problem.” Lou watched with some relief as Sprue sauntered back to the module airlock. At least he wasn’t up to anything that would’ve gotten both of them in serious trouble.

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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.

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Narrative

At Table

Although in theory only the pilots’ tables and the Medstaff tables were reserved for the exclusive use of particular groups, people still tended to sit with those they had something in common with, whether friends, family, or colleagues. Brenda usually sat with her children, but today they were eating with their training groups, so she was sitting with some of the other DJ’s. Not that there was a formal “radio table,” but she’d noticed several other people passing them by, even when there were empty seats.

Because who wants to sit here and listen to us talk shop and not understand half of what we’re saying.

Brenda could understand the feeling, since she wasn’t all that strong on the technical side of streaming Internet radio herself. Lou Corlin was talking about some issues IT was having with the streaming server. Nothing critical, nothing that would disrupt transmission, but still something that was obviously of concern. However, a lot of it was going over her head, for the simple reason that she wasn’t an IT specialist.

And it looked like she had some company. Sprue was trying not to look overwhelmingly bored, but he wasn’t doing nearly as good a job of it as he thought.

Recalling something Drew had mentioned, Brenda caught his gaze. “So how are things going with the new project of yours? Did you finally get to talk to Chandler?”

Sprue’s expression became awkward. “I’m not really supposed to be discussing it in a public place like this.” He extended a hand to encompass the dining commons, the crowd of people sitting at the tables or moving between them. “But Chandler did have a few ideas for things we might want to look at. You know, ways of analyzing data to tease out a little more meaning.”

He said “we.” Is he finally figuring out what it means to actually work as part of a team, or is he just saying that because Dad or Dr. Doorne put the fear of God in him for a change?

However, there was no time to ponder it, let alone ask any probing questions. Right then Captain Waite came in and took his place at the head table. Except he didn’t sit down to eat. Instead, he addressed the crowd: “If I may have your attention, I have some important announcements to make.”

Brenda’s gut clenched with anxiety. What was going on now?

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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.

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As If Things Aren’t Bad Enough

Spruance Del Curtin looked up at the big analog clock on the wall of the DJ booth. He still had half an hour left before he could sign off and head down to Innsmouth Sector. He was really tempted to play Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher,” just to hear the line about the clock being slow.

On second thought, he did not need to draw attention to the fact that he was clock-watching right now, and especially not with that song. He hadn’t forgotten the time he’d ended up with one of the pilot-astronauts after his hide over an on-air wisecrack about his teacher before playing it. And I didn’t even know Sid was sweet on her until Ken Redmond hauled my ass down to his office and bawled me out.

And it seemed like Ken would never quite let him back off the naughty list. If anything, this new assignment that had him doing liaison work between Engineering and IT seemed to make it worse, since now he had two bosses he needed to watch his step around.

That was when he noticed a commotion outside. Yes, it was Ken, coming down the corridor at a fair clip, and from the look of things, something was very wrong.

And then the door was opening and Ken was stuffing a piece of paper in his hand. Actual paper, not a text message.

As soon as Sprue saw the NOAA headers on the message, he had to take a deep breath and recover his composure. No wonder Ken had torn it right off the printer and run it over here. Up here on the Moon, solar storms were one of the biggest dangers, right there with explosive decompression and hypercapnia.

Just a few days ago the Sun had “tossed a hairball,” pilot slang for a Coronal Mass Ejection. At least that one had been on a part of the Sun away from the Earth-Moon system, so it shot harmlessly into deep space. Which was a good thing, considering it was an X-class, close to the Carrington Event in power.

Thankfully the latest one was much weaker. However, it was aimed almost directly at them, and would soon be bathing Farside in dangerous hard X-rays and charged particles. Which meant that they had to get the warning out now to all the outlying habitats to suspend all EVA’s and re-route all travelers to shelter.

Now the big question would be whether everyone here in Shepardsport would need to retreat to the solar storm shelters under the settlement’s water reservoirs. Not only would it disrupt all work in progress except essential life-support activities, it would also mean the pilots and spaceport personnel who were avoiding contact with the rest of the settlement’s population could not maintain their quarantine.

What would that mean for everyone?

Maybe we’ll be lucky and the energy levels will be low enough that we won’t have to take shelter. But even as that thought came to him, Sprue knew he was whistling in the dark.

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The Weight of Knowledge

Spruance Del Curtin would’ve liked to continue his text conversation with Chandler Armitage. However, there’d been no way to prolong it when he had an air shift to do.

And there was also the problem of broaching the subject he really wanted to discuss. Especially now that he’d been moved into a position where he actually knew what those data sets represented, Dr. Doorne had reiterated even more strenuously the absolute importance of information security.

Which was a completely reasonable requirement if her concern was that he’d go blabbing to all his buddies so that they’d be suitably impressed with the Important Work he was doing. He was no statistician, but he could see some very dangerous trends in those numbers. Implications that could very well create the very panic they were working to forestall.

On the other hand, it was a very different matter to be discussing it with Chandler, who was a naval aviator and a pilot-astronaut with enough background to actually understand what he was looking at, instead of just getting scared by those numbers and freaking out. But if someone were to gain access to his text records, they’d just see that he’d broken security and never notice or care about the qualifications of the person on the other end of the connection.

Which meant he needed to sit tight for the next three and a half hours, doing his air shift as if nothing were at all out of the ordinary — well, other than the fact that they were trying to keep a pandemic off the Moon. Once he got off shift, he could head down to Innsmouth Sector and talk to Chandler face to face — or at least as close to it as was possible with a sheet of moonglass between them and separate air circulation systems.

Maybe he’d better check and make sure whatever system transmitted their words didn’t have a record function. Damn, but it would be embarrassing to have a long talk with Chandler, and then discover every word of it was recorded and could be used to hang him out to dry.

Hadn’t one of the really early space station crews gotten into trouble because a conversation they’d assumed to be private was captured by the on-board recorders and was subsequently transmitted back to JSC for examination?

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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.