April 3: The Middle of Nowhere (8 page)

"But you don't know," Gunny suggested.

"No, no way to really know because there are no laws or limits to give us authority to even ask," Jeff agreed. "Atomic weapons are 1940s technology after all," he reminded them. "Getting the materials is the only real barrier. Laws have always been secondary to the physical difficulties of obtaining the plutonium or uranium.
These
weapons don't use either. If I found a way around that somebody else may have also," he said modestly.

"Well, we know Loonies can make at least tactical nuke size weapons. I wouldn't be surprised if they could manage strategic sized," April guessed.

"If they think on it," Jeff suggested, "they may see you could use the devices they already have in an implosion geometry to compress fusibles. It would require detonator circuitry with very accurate timing, but only slightly better than a plutonium fission bomb."

"If you see a way to do it that easily then the only safe way is to figure everybody has them," Gunny decided. "I'll keep this to myself," he volunteered, though they hadn't asked.

* * *

April didn't sleep well. She thought she was over the shock of the assassination attempt in the cafeteria as soon as her heart rate was back to normal. Instead it roused memories of her gun battle on Earth when Preston Harrison had tried to arrest her. Jeff's announcement and the burden of the codes probably didn't help either. A mish-mash of irrational confused images woke her up and she had to get up and have a hot chocolate and calm herself before she could go back to bed and eventually sleep.

In the morning Gunny was not up and she went ahead and went back to the cafeteria for breakfast without him. Ruby wasn't there and she wanted to thank Ruby for protecting her face to face, not on com. She was surprised when Gunny arrived at the cafeteria door at a jog. He slowed down and walked in normally, but she wasn't fooled. She'd heard him running. He'd been really moving only three or four paces outside the door.

He scanned the tables first and only then, after she was located and the room appraised did he get a tray and go through the line.

"Aren't you afraid to be here alone after yesterday?" he asked when he joined her.

"Not especially. If they can throw an assassin a day at me I won't hold out very long anyway. It costs a lot to send one up here. Surely we have until at least the next shuttle before we have to worry about another."

"Perhaps. I am a professional paranoid. I'd don't want to make any assumptions if an error means you are dead. I read last night that they have a solution to long term Bucky Ball toxicity and new life extension treatments might take us out to about three hundred years. It would be a shame to see that cut off for you at sixteen." Gunny suggested.

"Look at the curve for life extension," April said cutting a climbing graph in the air with her hand. "If we'll have three hundred now the curve is really turning up sharply," she said running her hand almost straight up. "I can't imagine another thousand and more won't be added on during that new period. Pretty soon homicide and suicide will be the only serious sources of morbidity. Beside the people who die young from stupidity before they have a chance to get any sense. Males especially," she said trying to tweak him a bit. He didn't bite. He agreed actually.

"I don't think you'll ever completely get rid of people who thrill seek like sky divers and folks who race cars. But I bet most will shun risk taking. Maybe even pay for delivery of groceries and stuff in order to hole up at home to avoid the risk of travel and exposure to disease."

"True," April agreed, "but trauma medicine is getting better and better too. You may have to really splatter yourself beyond scraping up or burn yourself up to be permanently dead."

"And yet they still can't freeze a large mammal and have it thaw completely normal and live a full life after. If your buddy Jeff really does make a starship, somebody better perfect that or it will be a mighty long boring trip to those stars if you need spend it awake."

"That's a problem. I assume there is probably somebody working on it who is a wizard at the biological sciences, just like Jeff is working at nano." April looked up sharply. "In fact I know just the person to commission," she said suddenly happy.

Gunny had jerked and scanned the room quickly when she looked up so abruptly. April examined his breakfast and he hadn't eaten much at all.

"Gunny, do you need a couple days off? I'm afraid yesterday imprinted you and you can't relax. Maybe there is some Post Traumatic Stress you need to deal with? There's medicine that eases that isn't there?"

"You should be the one stressed. Nobody was shooting at
me.
"

"I am a little. I had weird, mixed up dreams last night and got up in the middle of the night and walked around and made myself some hot chocolate. I'll go by the clinic after breakfast and talk to the doc on duty about it."

"I'll listen to whatever he tells you, but I'm not going to take anything that slows me down or will numb my valid judgment."

"Okay, but eat please. You can't stay fast and alert without fuel either," she pointed out.

Gunny considered his omelet. "I've let this get cold. I'll get it heated and some fresh hot cakes. Maybe you are right. We'll both talk to the doc."

When he came back Margaret was with him.

"Thank you so much for your protection last night," April said. She went around the table and hugged her after she put her tray down. Margaret hugged her back and didn't hurry to end it.

"That's why I was here," Margaret explained. "Alvin tagged that guy when he got off the shuttle as bad news and we had a watch on him every time he moved. Jon had me pre-positioned in the cafeteria as soon as he left his room and headed this way."

"You knew he was after April?" Gunny asked, frowning.

"No, we just figured he was up to no good. He could have been after somebody else, or been a saboteur. He was just too young and in too good a shape to be a pharmaceuticals salesman. If we knew he was targeting April, or anybody else, we'd have never let it progress so far."

"Good, I wouldn't approve of using her for bait," he said bluntly.

"I will never do that. Not only do I value her personally, after last night I'd never do anything to piss you off. I Tased him, but it was just following through what I'd started. By the him I hit him he was a dead man standing. You had
two
rounds in him before I fired. I was primed to draw and watching him. You had to react to his actions from a blank slate."

"You'd have gotten him before he fired though," Gunny ceded, "and Ruby…That woman is scary. She pushed off the counter instead of just using traction to go at him. I'm not sure she wouldn't have had her knife in him before he had that pistol extended and aimed."

"Even if he got it extended, it's tough to aim and fire effectively with a face full of scalding hot coffee," Margaret pointed out.

"Ed Page works out with our Tai Chi group most Wednesdays," April told them. "We don't just do the slow. We even do sword. He wasn't getting up to ask the guy for the next dance."

Margaret, had to yank her napkin up and catch her explosive laugh. She folded it over and wiped her eyes and blew her nose. "Sorry, your droll humor catches me now and then. I just had this mental image of Ed posed holding his hands the way guys do to ask for a dance. By the way, Jon has the guy's pistol and says it's rightfully yours as a trophy of combat," she told Gunny.

"Wow, the cops Earthside would
never
do that. I think you should give it to Ruby. She was the one who the nerve to attack a man armed with a gun with a kitchen knife."

"Ruby probably has better," April told him. "I know she and Easy own a Singh laser. Easy is the sort, well, when we flew together he brought his own Russian anti-armor missiles along. He had those and was holding them
before
the war last year. So who knows what he owns now?"

"Fine, then give it to Ed. He was just as brave as Ruby and maybe he needs an upgrade from a coffee mug."

"I'll tell him. Jon instructed medical to not do an autopsy on the guy. He just had them doing a toxicology work up, because Ruby said one of the reasons she was so suspicious of him was he had dilated pupils. They may have had him on some kind of drug."

"That would be stupid. It would ruin your sight picture. April wants me to see the clinic about some medication for PTS. I have concerns it would mess up my ability exactly like that."

"I'm on a low dose of two drugs that complement each other. I have been over a year, since the war. I haven't felt any need to adjust them for yesterday."

"Well whatever you're taking sure didn't seem to slow you down. I find that encouraging," Gunny said.

"Are you modified like April?" Margaret asked. "You just got here so you couldn't be a customer of Jelly, could you?"

"Jelly?"

"Nickname for our local gene-mod doc from his college days. He's okay and I'd say he's just about as fast as you or April. I can't afford it yet."

"Ruby wondered the same thing, but no, I am as I was born. I'm just naturally quick."

"If you go to the clinic talk to Dr. Lee. He's the one who helped me. Later guys." She was done with her light breakfast and hurried out.

"So, she fought in the war?" Gunny asked, fishing.

"She wiped out a squad of a dozen Space Seals by herself and folded the Heavy Space Shuttle
Cincinnati
over double, with its nose against its belly. In all fairness she did write on the lock not to enter or they'd be met with lethal force. The idiots came in anyway."

"You have some scary friends."

April decided that was some genuine humility. "Come on let's see if this Lee is in."

Doctor Lee was in and busy. They waited while he treated a beam dog who got pinched by a slow moving but massive truss. He left limping a bit with a three day rest order. He wasn't happy to lose suit hours even though he got base pay and even less happy that he was cut off from drinking while he used the pain medication.

It appeared Dr. Lee and one nurse practitioner were the entire duty crew.

"What do you do if you get a bunch of casualties all at once?" Gunny wondered.

"I have an off shift doctor I can wake up. There are a number of people trained in Emergency Medicine I can call on and residents who have said they would respond in an extreme emergency trained as nurses or military medics. It's possible to overwhelm local medical facilities anywhere," he asserted.

"That sounded more critical than I intended it to. It was a serious question. I am looking at living here so it concerned me."

"You have the same level of medical care here you'd expect in a small town in the USNA or Europe. If you need very specialized surgery you have to go down to a large metro area just like if you lived in a very small town in Idaho. There are places in large cities that have better trauma centers. But really good trauma centers are the result of areas where violence is common. Living close enough to one to be taken there is often riskier than living further away and having less chance of needing it."

"Then your crime level is very low here?" Gunny asked.

"I do not believe we have treated anyone in the last year injured as a result of crime."

"How about that guy in your cooler with a knife stuck in his back and the three rounds I put in his chest?"

"I don't count war and political assassination as crime, but believe me, he was well past any possible treatment when we got him here. That's a pattern I am seeing. Such violence tends to produce dead bodies and little treatable injury. Even when we had fighting on station back in the war there were only six wounded I am aware of needing treatment."

"Ask Jon if you want," April suggested. "I don't know if he keeps records of minor problems, like if somebody is drunk and disorderly and he escorts them home. He has not presented what you'd consider a felony to the Home Assembly since the war. He has the authority from the company to expel troublemakers who are just working here on temporary contracts."

"Interesting. I'm used to more crime even inside the sheltered environment of a base."

"We are a small community. A lot of crime like theft is harder to do here than down in an Earth town. You can't take your loot and drive to a town a little bit away to sell it," Lee said.

"I've seen you don't have big apartments full of status symbols. And some things, like a video screen, everybody seems to have one of. There aren't any 'have nots' to steal out of envy."

"How is the clinic funded?" Gunny wondered, looking around at an abundance of equipment. "Can three thousand people generate enough income to make it viable?"

"Mitsubishi carries most of the expense because they need it for the construction workers. The voting citizens agreed to kick in eight hundred dollars each as a base fund."

"A month?" Gunny interrupted.

"No, annually. That all covers cubic, power and some of our upkeep on equipment. We are charging three-hundred-forty dollars an hour for myself and the other doctor. And we are the only pharmacy for now so we make a little on drugs."

"I assume my USNA medical card is no good here?"

"No, just as you could not use on Earth in a foreign country we would not be reimbursed if we offered treatment on it. However we have a policy of no tiered prices. Everybody pays the same and we will try to quote as accurately as possible what elective services will cost. Did you want an estimate on some service?" He looked funny at April. "Do you need privacy?" he added.

"No, April is my employer at the moment. She actually urged me to come along because she intended to see you for the same reason. We are concerned we may be suffering from a degree of PTS. We, well, we've had a lot of people shooting at us lately. It's not paranoia because they really are," he emphasized.

"I'm neither a psychiatrist nor a psychologist, but there are characteristic patterns of brain activity for which we can look with a standard test. If they are evident to a lesser degree, there are several drugs that can offer some relief. If there is a really severe problem then there are stronger drugs and behavior therapy for which I'd refer you, but I'd say offhand that is not present or I'd see an overt presentation of inappropriate behavior."