April (55 page)

"The gun and the missiles were both carried loose," Jon explained. "The lasers are borrowed from Jeff's friends and just mounted temporary on the camera arm and a control cable run up to them. It's all their private property, not ships systems really. That's why you didn't see any line items for it. There is probably a couple hundred bucks somewhere for a cable to the camera arm head and labor to tie it down along the arm.

Jon learned a lot about Bob he'd rather not have known. There was not one question from him about his crew's safety. Not even his own sister.

"I'll do the best I can," Bob agreed. "We're going to need the funds, because when this goes public my insurance underwriter is going to have a fit. I may have to go naked if we can't afford the premiums," he complained.

Jon could pleasantly picture him naked - in a cycling airlock with an alarmed expression and his cheeks puffed out.

* * *

"I'm not asking for payment for a news story," Bob Lewis explained patiently. "I've already given you the story for free and you can do what you want with it. I'm sure you have lots of ways to check its accuracy. I'm offering you the video, which makes the story more than just talking heads. Without the video it's just a he said, ho-hum story." He explained patiently.

"This is the first recorded space battle, which has ships attacking within close camera range of each other. It's spectacular. It has the audio in the clear between the ship commanders and video of hand to hand combat in p-suits. It's going to be ranked as famous a historical treasure as pics of the Hindenburg in flames, the early Space Shuttle disasters, Kennedy getting shot in Dallas, the planes hitting the World Trade Center or Kargil getting nuked."

"And I'm offering you a twelve or twenty-four hour first use exclusive, on the only full file. After the contract period I can offer partials and stills to others, but you still have the whole package to sublet as you wish for the exclusive period, while it's still news instead of history."

"If you don't take it they'll be talking about you for years in the news business. They'll say - Remember the guy at BBC who shot his career in the head and told the chap with the
Happy Lewis
video to go sell it to the French? Sad case, what the hell was the man thinking? Up to you. If you want a couple still frames to sell the package to your bosses I will sell them to you cheap, with a limited use license and a non-disclosure agreement. Then you have fifteen minutes to talk to your directors."

"If you can't make a decision in that time frame the offer is withdrawn and I
will
sell it to someone else and you can watch it on their news channel while you start refreshing your resume. If you can't handle making a call on the big stories you shouldn't be sitting in the chair. If you even have to
ask
your bosses what you should do they're going to remember it and realize the footage almost got away."

The man looking back at him did not disguise his anger and dislike for Bob. "I don't have the authority to spend that kind of money. I can't imagine anybody paying ten million Euro for a video, if it was the second coming complete with a sound track of the heavenly trumpets."

He didn't like some kid talking to him like an equal. Take it back. Talking down to him. He didn't like being put on the spot to make a decision about anything either. He had been successfully for years,  avoiding any decisions which could possibly be laid at his feet if they went bad.

"Well then you're wasting my time. I didn't know you were just the night receptionist. Do you want to transfer me to a boss, or should I just move on?"

When he split the screen and called up another man, he was only off screen about a half  minute in private, before the other fellow came on the split. He had obviously been awakened to join them and the news director was still going on about how sorry he was to wake him up.

"Mac, if you are going to stay in the conference call shut the hell up. I'm awake and I want to hear why. If there was no good reason it's too late to say anything to make it any better and if there is a good reason I need to hear what it is. Now, you young fellow. I'm John Briggs and I need two facts first. Who are you and what have you got to peddle to us?"

Bob smiled. Here was somebody he could talk to.

* * *

"Stupid, stupid, stupid," Peter Hadley muttered, looking at the wall screen and the destruction of one of the most advanced and expensive space planes his nation had built. His advisers, clustered away from the screen kept silent and watched the horrible scene licensed to CNN by BBC. Early risers in much of Europe were seeing it before breakfast and parts of Asia watching it as late news.

He watched for the second time the shattered halves of the ship tumble away from each other in a debris field and the front portion pass in front of the burnt and warped husk which had been the
Jade,
drifting dead near it. He was sitting in a green robe and burgundy slippers with his hair uncombed and had been awakened early, but not quickly enough to direct the first response to this news.

"There are all kinds of lies you can get away with," he explained.  "Some will last forever. Some will last until the people involved are all dead, some you hope will last long enough nobody really cares about them any longer. This though, has the potential life of a fruit fly. Didn't anybody think before they told a whooper, which will be meat for political cartoonists and comedians tomorrow?"

"We only have seven planes of this class and the crews are all an elite who are used for recruiting and followed by space nuts just like baseball heroes or music stars. There is no way you can deny losing one and just switch another for it, or have them whip up a replacement in secret. It takes almost a year to build one of the things and the assembly building already has two in progress. They are even named before they are finished, with mission dates assigned and crews waiting for them to be released."

"It just seemed like the right thing, to not verify such a outrageous claim without hard proof. I mean - How can it possibly be a true account for a light work scooter to destroy two major vessels like nothing?" His press secretary asked.

"Do you think they faked this in a studio? Drew it all in a computer? I'm sure they sat around a table and asked how it could happen, when the American Pacific fleet was wiped out at Pearl Harbor by a bunch of backward Japanese, who all the military experts said were still flying obsolete biplanes. But it didn't bring them floating back to the surface. And they sure as hell didn't make matters worse, by telling the press the stories of the attack were unconfirmed and unlikely."

"I can't even safely go to bed without somebody doing major damage before I wake up. Thank Goodness - at least the Chinese opened fire first. Not as if they're going to apologize for doing so, anymore than the Captain of the
Jade
did. Arrogant bunch of xenophobes!"

He nodded at the screen. "Go back to the scene where the director of Security on ISSII speaks to the shuttle pilot." He watched it carefully again.

"There's no way to say he means something else. Damn his lack of diplomacy. I wonder if he knew they were recording him? It doesn't seem rehearsed. Just standing around seeing his buddy off and telling war stories. He certainly committed the Europeans to at least offering this Nam-Kah asylum if we refuse to. He seems to be committed to driving a wedge between the Chinese and us."

"If we hand her back to the Chinese now we'll never live it down. If they manage to return to M3, then when we lock down the station, the newsies will be on us to account for her. We'll have to separate her and get her away from the station as soon as we can, before we close it off. It would be better from a public relations view to grant her asylum, but she's not worth a war. And I'd rather see her returned, than the Europeans take her in and rub our noses in it."

"Let's see the fight in the cabin again and slow it down." The helmet camera view from April's suit, swung around to the frightening monster of the Chinese officer in his space armor. His hard expression was easily seen through the faceplate. The machine pistol looked huge pushed out in front of him closer to the camera lens. He filled the view so much, you could not see what Ajay was doing behind. There was a brief view of his feet pushing off the overhead, as he did a one bouncer to come up behind the man and the flash of the blade so fast it was an elongated silver blur even in the slow motion.

The blade went through hard suit cuff and wrist inside with no noticeable slowing. The stub was not even dragged along by the blade. It just sheared it as clean as a wax model being cut with a razor. He had not noticed it in normal play speed, but in slow motion he saw what stopped the blade was it bit deeply into the man's pelvis, through the equipment anchored around the hips of his suit, in as far as the centerline of the leg. That blow alone would have been fatal without what happened next. The man's face through the glass finally registered shock, long after the blade was stopped. The air escaping from both wounds spun him around, as did the sword being yanked out of the hip.

As he spun around, he flew face first back into Ajay, who was briefly visible, still drawing the sword back in a two handed grip for a thrust, his elbows out and his face a mask of fury. As he spun back into him, Ajay wrapped his legs around the man's waist until his ankles almost crossed. Then with the man's back centered in the camera view, the point of the sword suddenly appeared in the center of the man's back.

Even in slow motion it didn't emerge. One frame it was blank armor and the next the blade was just there. The entire suit jerked with the power of the thrust. The detail of its classical Japanese faceted blade end was easy to see in the video. Even the patterns in the steel and dark wiggly line along the cutting edge. There was too little sticking out to see the curve of the blade.

"Son of a bitch," one of the military men muttered, in genuine shock. Ajay's contorted face showed briefly over the suit's shoulder. "Just your typical middle aged scientist, out for a cruise. It really takes big brass ones, to dive into a guy holding an automatic weapon with a damn knife. And who the hell carries around a frigging sword on a space ship?"

"I don't know," the fellow at his elbow said. "But I might write a paper recommending it and attach this file as a footnote. Notice he finished him off nicely, but didn't damage anything on the ship? If the Chinaman had used the pistol inside, you can pretty well bet he would have destroyed some vital system on the ship, instead of hijacking it as he wanted."

"Go back to the scene where they are shooting the antenna off the station," the president again requested, ignoring the banter. He watched the green square beam play back and forth across the shapes like a garden hose. It didn't pulse with pauses to build back up. Apparently it was capable of going on and on. "I want to hear from our people what kind of power they have to run those weapons continuously," he told Frank and the men gathered behind him.

One of the uniformed men cleared his throat nervously. "I can tell you something about the power at least, Sir," he offered. The President didn't seem disposed to beg for it, so he went on quickly. "We have neutrino detectors, which are being developed for communications. This ship radiates neutrinos, in pulses so brightly it floods and overwhelms our detectors. The only source we know of with a similar level of emissions is a nuclear fusion reaction. So that is the probable source of the ship's motive power and also auxiliary power to run all its onboard systems."

"And how long have you been detecting this sort of thing?" the President cut to the insightful question immediately.

"Well they had similar emissions on the Mitsubishi station about a month ago and we sent an agent in to investigate, but he couldn't penetrate the security at Lucent within his mission constraints. Their lab is where it was running, because we can locate the source to about three meters by using three receivers and comparing timing of small variations in the flux. We did serve a warrant on Lucent to identify who works in that part of their property. Our agent then did a sneak and peek in the apartment of the principal researcher, who used the Lucent work area to see what he could find. There was an unusually capable computer in the home and man was away on ISSII, but it was booby trapped and self destructed. So he came home basically empty handed."

"And nobody thought it worth mentioning to me someone had invented an entirely new sort of power generator? What is the difference between this generator and a normal commercial fusion power plant?"

"Well the minimum size practical for a commercial fusion reactor is currently about 1.5 Terawatt and you usually put it on about a 60 to 80 acre site, plus a security perimeter. Bussard reactors are only useful in hard vacuum and require a rather large vessel to be practical. They still don't have the acceleration this displays. This whole ship, which we're assuming carries a fusion generator, could easily fit inside the vacuum vessel of a  commercial power plant."

The President seems to consider all the possibilities for a moment. "So they have developed a miniature version of a fusion plant?"

"No Sir," the military man said, looking uncomfortable. "The physics of it are not possible to miniaturize, or we would have done it already. Someone has devised a way to do this based on entirely new principles. We honestly don't have a clue how to do it."

"But you can detect it running and locate it accurately. Excuse me, but doesn't that also mean you could have informed the
Kelly
that the vessel they were trying to intercept had moved off some kilometers away and was not where the radar said it was?"

"In theory, yes we could have, but first, we had already decided not to disclose the existence of our equipment, or what we knew outside a very small group, because of the sensitive nature of the information. General Horton in the Space watch group did inquire, has been inquiring repeatedly, about the drive on this vessel and was told it was classified beyond his need to know. He was admittedly very upset about being refused. But it really doesn't matter, because they shut down their fusion generator and curtailed emissions, before moving off and waiting in ambush for the
Kelly
and the
Jade
."