Tag: Spruance Del Curtin

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Narrative

Hello Goodbye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hi, Cindy. What is it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Narrative

A Warning Against Nosiness

Reggie Waite studied his younger clone-brother. “Good afternoon, Sprue. Do you have any idea why I’ve called you in here today?”

Spruance Del Curtin tensed, a subtle movement barely visible through his track suit. “No.”

Yes, there was a subtle hesitation, a drawing out of the negative particle with a little too much emphasis. Subtle cues, but easier to recognize in your own flesh and blood. Sprue wasn’t trying to falsely deny a definite positive. Instead, he was trying to brush away a multitude of possibilities.

“I was expecting that answer.” Reggie kept his voice mild, knowing it would keep Sprue wondering. “No doubt there are so many places you’ve been sailing a lee shore that you’re not sure which one’s the problem.”

Make that definite — Sprue had quite a few things on his mind. Now the question was whether to openly confront him about his pump people for information, or to leave things ambiguous enough that he’d might decide to tighten up on a number of things where he was playing fast and loose.

As Reggie expected, Sprue was far too cagey to blurt anything out. “It seems like someone’s always after me for something. One person’s unhappy that I’m not studying enough to suit them, and another’s complaining that I’m showing people up. It’s pretty hard to know what’s the real problem.”

“In which case, maybe you ought to do some serious thinking about just what you’re doing, and why it bothers people.” Reggie looked straight into his eyes. “Consider this a warning that some people are not pleased with your attitude, and things may go poorly for you if they do not see some change. Dismissed.”

Sprue managed to choke out something shaped like a promise to do better, then left in a little more haste than was appropriate. However, calling on him on a violation of protocol at this point would not be a good idea.

Still, they were going to need to curb his curiosity. That or bring him in on things, which would require being confident he knew when to keep his mouth shut.

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Narrative

Teasing Out Answers

There was a trick to chatting up girls without crossing the line to actually hitting on them. It had taken Sprue some time to learn it, mostly because in his younger days he’d rarely had any need of the skill. If he was interested in a girl, he was going to want to hit on her, not just chat her up.

But right now the last thing he wanted was to have anyone thinking he was trying to hit on Cindy Margrave. Technically she was Betty Margrave and Carl Dalton’s niece, not their daughter, and had inherited none of the Shepard geneset. But Betty had taken in Cindy and her sister Kitty after their parents died in a freak accident, rather like Alan and Louise Shepard had taken in a niece, Alice. Because the girls had come up here as a part of Carl Dalton’s household, everyone was treating Cindy and Kitty as if they were members of the Shepard lineage, just like their cousins.

The first thing he had to have solid was his pretext for being at the station offices so early. It would’ve been so much easier if he could’ve switched air shifts with Brenda Redmond or Lou Corlin. However, neither of them had pressing business any time in the near future that would necessitate such a trade, and neither did he.

So here he was, getting copies of some logs, supposedly for his statistics class. “I don’t know why they’ve got Dr. Doorne teaching it, especially considering that she’s a radio astronomer and electrical engineer. You’d think they’d have her teaching actual astronomy, or maybe signal processing.”

Cindy set her tablet back down. “A lot of astronomy these days involves statistical analysis. Especially radio astronomy, since it’s almost entirely sorting through massive amounts of data and picking out the significant signals from a metric butt-ton of random noise. Or at least that’s what I learned in the astronomy overview class I took a few training cycles back. And down in IT we do a lot of work with astronomical data.”

Sprue considered how to steer the conversation towards a broader discussion of data, and then medical data in particular. Or at least interesting bits of data coming in from Earth, stuff that didn’t seem to fit with the pattern.

“Good morning, Mr. Del Curtin.” The deep, gruff voice could only belong to Ken Redmond, Chief of Engineering.

Sprue turned to face the older man. “Um, good morning.”

Ken stayed just far enough back that he didn’t obviously have to look up at Sprue’s greater height. “I believe you have some other place to be this early in the morning.”

Sprue recognized the warning in those words. Although Ken Redmond was not their direct supervisor, the station was considered to be part of Engineering for administrative purposes, and thus he had disciplinary authority over all its personnel. And Sprue had not forgotten what had happened when he ran afoul of Redmond in the past.

“As it happens, I really need to get this data sorted through in time for class tomorrow.” He turned back to Cindy. “I guess I’ll have to talk to you later.”

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Narrative

Just a Friendly Warning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Narrative

More Questions than Answers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Narrative

Who Knows What and Which?

The Shepardsport dining commons was crowded this evening. And it didn’t look like just a matter of people who had their lunches sent to their desks showing up now.

Lou Corlin looked over at the pilots’ table, crowded to capacity. He hadn’t seen it that full since Shepardsport was handling flights displaced by the cyber-attack on Slayton Field. Usually Shepardsport got mainly cargo landers, since Farside wasn’t exactly a tourist destination.

A lot of the local pilots preferred to sit with their families at one or another of the small round tables. Bill Hearne almost always sat with his family, and Sid Abernathy often joined his wife at one of the scientists’ tables.

Still, the sheer level of crowding made Lou uneasy, and not just because of the increased difficulty in finding a seat. Usually one of his clone-brothers would have a free seat at his table, but from the looks of things, he was going to have a hunt on his hands.

And then someone shouted his name. He turned to discover that no, it was not a fellow Chaffee, but a Shep.

What does Spruance Del Curtin want with me now?

Although Lou really didn’t want to sit with Sprue, giving him the cut in such a public setting would be rude in the extreme. And while Sheps could be incredibly competitive with one another, having one of their number dissed by a clone of a member of the third astronaut selection group might just be enough to get them to circle the wagons. And becoming a target of the mischief of Sheps would not be a pleasant experience.

Lou slid into the available seat. “What is it, Sprue?”

“What have you heard about the Glorianna?”

“Only what was on the announcement this afternoon.” Lou studied the Shep, wishing he could look through those buggy blue eyes to the mind behind them and see just what he was up to. Is he trying to lead me into speculating about what’s going on? “It does sound disturbing.”

“Disturbing is a mild way to put it.” Sprue didn’t even bother to hide the annoyance in his voice. Make it definite he wanted to gossip-monger, never mind how many times senior leadership had warned against passing rumors or speculating on partial information. “I was hoping you might know something, especially since you do your operational responsibility down in IT. I’m sure you get to see a lot of data going by.”

How to get this conversation into a parking orbit without blatantly shutting Sprue down? “Of course I do, but most of it’s pretty technical stuff. And anything from Medlab is covered by patient privacy law, so I’m not even cleared to see the metadata. I’m not even supposed to talk about how many cron jobs they’re putting through, because in theory that could allow someone to know what questions are worth asking.”

Sprue nodded, but the annoyance furrow remained between his eyebrows. “And you probably can’t tell me if any department’s been showing unusual levels of web traffic either. But you know as well as I do that all those public service announcements about sanitation didn’t come out of nowhere. I’m thinking that whatever bug got loose on that cruise ship, someone around here has known about it for the past several days.”

“That’s quite possible.” Lou considered how many times he’d had to run one of the several pre-recorded announcements over the past three air shifts. “But speculating on it isn’t helpful, and it could get both of us into some serious hot water with the higher-ups.” He cast a significant glance at the people who were beginning to look their way.

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Sprue didn’t sound happy about having to make that admission, but he’d gotten in trouble more than once for things that gotten him taken off his air shifts as punishment. “But I think all of us ought to keep our eyes and ears open for anything significant.”

Lou didn’t like agreeing; it felt too much like promising something he shouldn’t. But at least it allowed him to move the conversation onto a more neutral subject.

Even so, he found that he was still thinking about the subject by the time dinner was over and he headed back to quarters to study for that upcoming test in DiffEq.

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Narrative

The Balloon Goes Up

Normally Spruance Del Curtin looked forward to his air shifts. He’d even warned more than one instructor that he was not to be held over if it were going to interfere with making his air shift.

However, the last few days had been getting annoying. How many times could you keep repeating announcements about standard sanitation protocols after every set before it started sounding ridiculous? Not to mention how people were really starting to wonder what was going on. It was getting annoying to go down to the dining commons, or any public area for that matter, and get peppered with the same damn questions, especially since he didn’t have any answers for them.

At least the messages were pre-recorded, so it wasn’t like he had to read a card off a monitor. Or worse, a hand-written note, like Ken Redmond had given him for a couple of emergencies.

The current set was coming to an end, so he’d better check which one was lined up for this commercial break and station identification.

As he did, the door opened and in walked Autumn Belfontaine. She was cutting it fine — two minutes more and he would’ve been on the air.

She didn’t even say hello, just sat down in the second chair. Whatever was going on, asking her would not be a good idea.

The moment the last song ended, Autumn began to speak. “This is Autumn Belfontaine, news director at Shepardsport Pirate Radio. We have important breaking news, just in from the South Pacific. The United States Navy reports they have responded to a distress call from the cruise ship Glorianna, off the coast of Papua New Guinea. Initial reports indicate that crew and passengers were stricken with illness several days after completing a visit to Bangkok.”

Even as Sprue admired her calm delivery, his mind reeled at what he was hearing. He’d heard stories about illness spreading on those giant floating cities, but it was usually an intestinal bug that meant a few days of utter misery, but no great danger to any but the frail elderly or people with prior health conditions. Usually because someone was careless about what they ate and drank at some Third World port of call, and got sick just in time to infect everybody.

This sounded like something far worse. Which made him really wonder about all those public service announcements he’d been having to run for the past several days. How much had the higher-ups known, and for how long?

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Narrative

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.