April 3: The Middle of Nowhere (7 page)

Margaret from Security was sitting against the other wall right by the entry. Usually nobody sat there unless it was full because it was as far from the line and coffee as you could get. But she had a pad open and some hard copy on the table like she was working. Which she confirmed even before April unloaded her tray. A message appeared in her spex that she was working and couldn't visit, so April just replied 'OK' in text with a flick and blink of her eyeballs since she had the tray in both hands.

There was Mr. Muños, as usual the center of a deep discussion and Ed Page who was a multi-tasker with an actual computer open, not just a pad. He'd eat breakfast and watch the news and manage his stocks while listening to the Muños group and not miss any of it. There was a new guy by the coffee she didn't know, but he had eyes only for the girl with him.

Ben Patsitsas the author came in with his usual scarf around his neck. On his heels was a new guy, Oriental, but big. He looked more like he belonged in the other cafeteria with the fit, young vacuum rats and beam dogs.

She had her stuff all off the tray, so Gunny pulled it over and set his tray inside hers and sat down beside her, eating off the tray. He hadn't done that last night.

It finally slowed down enough there was nobody in the food line waiting and Ruby came out with a rag to tidy up the coffee area.

April stabbed a few pieces of salad and a shrimp on her fork when Gunny stood back up. What she didn't expect was his big hand reaching in past her arm to tip her over backwards chair and all. She wasn't even halfway to the floor before there was a >BOOMBOOMBOOM<.

Her ears were ringing and she looked up, laying on her back, to see Gunny drop the hammer on his new pistol and slide it back in his holster before he reached a hand down to help her up. She had to switch her fork to the other hand to accept his help. Once she was up he reached back and sat her chair upright and took off for the commotion over by the coffee machines without a word of explanation.

April followed him wondering what was going on.

The Oriental fellow who came in last was sprawled on the floor. He was a gory mess in the middle of his chest and weirdly his hair and the shoulder of his shirt were all wet but steaming. There was the handle of a kitchen knife sticking out of his lower back. Just then Jon rushed in with McAlpine. When he saw the body he breathed a visible deep sigh of relief and holstered his weapon. He pulled a chair up at the next table and made a call on his pad while Margaret hovered over him and Gunny leaned in and said a few quiet words. Then Gunny quietly spoke to Ruby and she laughed and gave him a play poke.

Gunny came back to her and put a big hand on her shoulder. "Let's go sit back where we were and Jon will come tell you what's happening when he gets it sorted out."

"I can't eat now," April protested.

"Neither can I," Gunny agreed. "Maybe after the adrenaline high wears off a bit. I need to just sit a minute. I'm kind of shaky."

"Oh, Okay." April was more willing to accommodate his need to sit than her own. She watched Jon finish talking to Margaret. The medical crew showed up and after a brief discussion with Jon and bagged up the dead guy. Jon conducted brief separate interviews with Ruby and Mr. Page and somebody showed up from maintenance and was cleaning the floor and all the tables and chairs on that side of the room.

"What did you say to Ruby?" April asked. She thought it bizarre she'd laughed.

"I told her she scared the crap outta me running up directly behind my target like that."

"She thought that was funny?"

"She said the Chinese fellow was so wide I couldn't have missed him with a brick."

Most of the crowd there left and the few who stayed moved over where Margaret had been sitting. The cleaning guy sprayed and wiped Mr. Page's computer and helped him move it. Ruby came out and gathered all the trays and plates wearing gloves and took them to the back.

The next shift cook came in and after a brief word and a hug Ruby headed out the door, obviously done for the day. The new cook took both carafes of coffee away and cycled the pot.

When Jon was through with everyone else he took Gunny over two tables away and had a conversation in low tones. She caught a couple words, but her ears were still ringing a little.

Finally Jon came to her last and Gunny took a seat on the other side of her.

"Take this," Jon said putting a capsule by her glass. "It will keep you from having any permanent hearing damage from the gunfire. Your ears are probably ringing, aren't they?"

"Yeah, a little." Gunny had just swallowed one too and she chugged hers with some of the lemonade. It was good and she took a couple more swallows of it before putting it down. She didn't tell him she'd taken them before down on Earth.

"Tell me what happened since you walked in the door of the cafeteria today," Jon asked.

April related everything she could remember. Even who she observed was here and the way Gunny ate off his tray instead of removing everything to the table. Then how she'd been shoved back and she'd had to curl forward to avoid banging her head and what she'd observed when she followed Gunny to the other side of the room.

Jon just nodded a few times and stayed attentive, letting her go at her own pace.

"The fellow who was killed waited until you looked down at your food and then stood, drawing a pistol as he stood. He was looking right at you and it's pretty obvious he'd been warned how fast you are and was waiting to move on you until you had your attention elsewhere. He really should have been patient and waited for both you
and
Gunny to be looking down. Not that it would have saved him, but I would have thought it was obvious Gunny is a guard. He discounted him entirely too much."

"Why wouldn't that have saved him?" April asked.

"Watch the security video," Jon invited and sat his pad open to her and played the captured scene in slow motion.

The man sat his tray down and seated himself, but he didn't scoot his chair in. He looked to the right where Mr. Page was looking at his computer screen. There was an empty chair between them and he was the closest of the group with Mr. Muños. He glanced to the left but there was nobody close, just Margaret clear across four rows of tables against the far wall.

Page's eyes flicked to the left when the man looked away, but his fingers never hesitated, continuing to click, click, click away at the entry he was making.

Ruby was walking slowly, sliding a rag along the edge of the counter, but she was watching the new guy from behind and frowning.

When the man started to stand back up he already had his hand on his gun on his left side, worn cross-draw. He stood too abruptly, telegraphing something wasn't normal. Ruby shoved off the counter hard with her right hand. The rag went flying and revealed she had a twenty centimeter chef's knife clutched in her hand under the rag. It was three long steps to the man.

Mr. Page threw the mug of coffee in his left hand with no discernible hesitation at all. He couldn't have seen the gun yet, just the motion that shouted it was being drawn.

The man was still hunched over slightly, gun just a little higher than the table edge when Gunny's first round hit him right in the breast bone. The coffee mug hit the side of his face just about when the second round hit him a couple centimeters from the first.

By the time the coffee was a explosion of drops splashing off his face there was a violet aura of electric discharges arching through them and all around the man's head. Margaret had discharged her Air-Taser dead on the man's head and it looked like she had the power level set lethally high.

The man spasmed from the Taser, gun hand jerking up past the point he'd have thrust it forward, hand opening in a claw. The gun would continue climbing and sailed over the group talking to Muños to bounce off the next table onto the floor.

His back arched from the electrical jolt, helped by the impact of a third slug from Gunny. He was bent the other way now, backward. Ruby slammed into him from behind with her left shoulder, not taking time to slow down. Her right hand slammed the blade into his back to the hilt right where a kidney would be.

Ed Page was pushing himself up off the table, obviously intending to offer further violence than the coffee mug. But by the time Ed was fully vertical the man was going down the other way, rolling off the edge of the table from Ruby impacting him from behind. Ruby yanked sideways on the knife handle, twisting it in the fellow and it was wrenched out of her hand as he went down crooked, falling on his side.

Page stopped his motion, needing a step to stop his forward momentum and it was all over except for a vicious kick Ruby gave the fellow after he sprawled on the floor.

"Poor son of a bitch had no idea what hit him," Jon explained unnecessarily.

"Who would want to hurt me bad enough to send somebody all the way up here?" April asked, shocked.

"Well, the remnants of the Patriot Party, any of the genetic purity nuts, maybe even rogue elements of the USNA government or military all come to mind," Jon theorized, "but I'm guessing just from his appearance that it is the Chinese who are still peeved with you, this time."

"Do you think Jeff or Heather might be targeted?" she suddenly worried.

"I called then and cautioned them on the way over here," Jon assured her.

April looked at Gunny, thinking how she'd told her mother she didn't really need him here. She dug in her pocket and got the platinum coin she'd got from Jeff. "Performance bonus," she told him and flipped the bright thing to him. He snatched it out of the air, looking pleased.

Chapter 6

Jeff called April and asked to came over with Heather a couple hours after the shooting. It was really unusual to see Jeff angry. April remembered what Gunny had said about wanting to see if he really shot laser beams out of his eyes. Except this look would freeze anything solid rather than vaporize it. Jeff, angry, spoke softly and was scary cold.

"Jon said the man who tried to shoot you had tattoos that are common to Chinese special forces. They just don't seem capable of leaving us alone. You know I've been diverting some income to buy rods. They are cheap and very hard to stop. However they have to be dead on a target to do any damage since they are just kinetic weapons."

Bad enough to knock out a nuke sub underwater
, Gunny thought but didn't say anything.

"I have five other special weapons stealthed and in orbit. They use a new tech based on some of my mom's work. I wanted to sneak one off and test it before releasing them to you and Heather, but this decided me to give you the orbital elements and go codes. If you call them up in your spex or on a screen you can see a cone of possible maneuver. Or if you designate a point on the Earth's surface it will tell you when the next one can reach it." Open your pad and I'll transfer the full data set to you."

"Why couldn't you test these like you wanted?" April asked.

"I needed two vehicles. One to carry a sample around the other side of the sun and one to record the test and return. It's expensive and would take months. It's hard to cover up buying and sending them off. And more importantly right now it would take too long and waste one of them when it will be months before I can get the materials to make more. I'm very confident they'll work, I'm just not sure what the yield will be."

"You must have a guess though,"

"I'm
pretty
sure it will yield fifty megatons. If it fused
all
the hydrogen and lithium it would yield near a hundred megatons. My mum thinks we may get secondary reactions fusing heavier elements.  You get declining energy boosts from secondary fusion reactions all the way to iron after all. I'd be really, really surprised if, as it is presently configured, it went over two-hundred megatons. That may sound like a big range, but it's all within an order of magnitude," he pointed out.

"How do you intend to use these?" April asked, worried.

"I'd reserve them for if Home itself is directly attacked, or if one of we three are assassinated. If you find some circumstances that warrant using them, you have the codes now. I wouldn't expect you or Heather to use them lightly," he assured them.

"If my assassin had succeeded?" she wondered.

"Beijing and the entire communist party hierarchy there would be a huge smoking crater, decapitating China as the strategists say." He looked like he wanted to say more, so she kept quiet. Gunny looked scared to death.

"If you drop one on Beijing and that just hardens their resolve, the other four dropped off their coast should remove half their population and a third of their industry. It would remove them as a world power for the next several decades. If that doesn't break them talk to my Mum. She'll finish it for you. I don't know how, but she said she can and I believe her. Although if it has gotten to that point I'm guessing she won't need requests to act on her own. She has no love of China after how they have treated her."

"Does China have any idea its existence is so precarious?" April asked.

"No and I doubt you could convince them. They are such arrogant liars they can't imagine anybody else isn't like them. April, they still think they
own
my Mother. They are just frustrated they can't reclaim their slave and the value of her education. They are very bad people," he said with frightening sincerely.

"Not so much different than North America," Gunny growled. "I'm paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to basically buy my freedom from them," he pointed out.

"Thank you for listening," Jeff told them. "I know it's late and you have to still be upset about the shooting, but I just felt like if I waited until morning to tell you and pass the codes I was taking a chance. I feel like we are all at risk now, every hour and I wanted these codes in your and Heather's hands."

"Not my business, but I'm curious since you are letting me hear this, it isn't something the militia has access to?" Gunny asked.

"No this is our private system. I don't think ill of the militia, but I'm hesitant to give that many people access to a system that can obliterate a few hundred square miles with one strike. There are a lot of armed merchant ships now, so no telling who has private weapon systems. I do doubt if anybody has weapons this large," he allowed.