April (62 page)

Outside in the corridor stood Jon with a stubby wicked looking shotgun hanging on a harness in front of him and a pair of night vision goggles pulled down around his neck. Finally the light came back on and didn't flicker this time. Steve showed optimism by turning the flashlight off.

"I'm so sorry," Jon started. "I got here as soon as I could." He just reached with both huge arms and scooped them both in to him. It was awkward encompassing them, even though Steve was a small man, with April in a suit, her dad with a flash light in one hand and a .45 in the other and Jon's shotgun hanging between them. Her dad worked the arm with the flashlight loose to throw over one of Jon's shoulders, but the Colt he kept safely pointed at the floor down by his leg. He let Jon squeeze them for a moment, but finally said, "Uh, Jon. I don't have my pistol safe. Be careful, please.  I don't want to blow somebody's toes off." He let them loose, but left a hand on each of their shoulders. Still reassuring himself he hadn't lost them. Steve thumbed the safety on the Colt and slid it in his waist band.

"Look at you two pirates. Why did I think you needed any help? What can I do for you? Do you need anything?"

"This may seem trite, but as long as the lights are on, can I
please
just go take a shower?" April begged. For some reason they both thought it hilarious.

* * *

McAlpine sat patiently in the dark. His ankles crossed and propped up on the fancy table. He had a mug of coffee sitting there. A few cold swallows left in the bottom. His Taser was in his lap, his right hand not gripping it, but laying loose on top.

The door from the lobby opened silently and Mr. Harris slunk in. There was no other way to describe it. His body language shouted deceit and he left the door open wide and went to the safe, opening it in the light spilling in the door. He opened the heavy door wide and spread open the top of the carryon bag he had at his feet. He picked up the box which April and Jeff had entrusted to him and placed it inside carefully, almost reverently. He didn't bother with anything else in the safe.

He straightened up and put his left hand on the door to pull it closed and froze. A bright red dot of laser light was shining on the door by his hand. He looked at the scintillating dot unwavering on the door and slowly turned his head over his shoulder.

"Oh, it's you McAlpine!" He made a pretense of relaxing, but his eyes were hard and calculating. "What are you doing sitting in the dark?"

"What are you doing slinking about in the dark in your own office? Guilty about something Tony?"

Neil had never called him by his given name before. That alone signaled things were not right. He frowned at the familiarity. "I am afraid these are no longer safe here. It's best if we hide them somewhere for awhile. The soldiers coming will have no respect for our obligations to our guests."

"Wouldn't surprise me at all. In fact, I'd be astonished if you weren't helping them. You seem to have a small bag packed there. Planning a little holiday? How about showing me what you have in the bag. Did you remember your passport?

"It's certainly none of your concern," he said sternly and hefted the bag strap to his shoulder. He pushed the heavy door roughly shut on the safe and reset the lock. While he was turned facing the safe, bag opposite Neil, his hand slid quickly down the strap into the bag.

McAlpine stunned him with his hand still in the bag. Never bothering to take his feet off the table. He swiveled around, stretched his legs, cracked his neck both ways and looked at the man's vacant eyes staring back at him.

"I've been wanting to do that for a long time Harris," he said aloud. He walked over and pulled the bag out from under Harris's shoulder where he had dropped on it and reached inside. There was an antique Pietro Berretta inside. An expensive collector's piece. He put the safety on, pulled its teeth, made sure the chamber was empty and stuck the magazine back in. It was sleek enough to slide in his pants pocket easily.

* * *

Margaret listened to Jon in her earpiece. "Seems silly, but OK." She went back out in the gate area, took a large vacuum marker and wrote on the airlock:

- LOCK OPEN - NOT CONTESTED TO MINIMIZE CIVILIAN CASUALTIES - M3 MILITIA - On the inner door she wrote - ANY FORCE DAMAGING LOCK WILL HAVE NO PRISONERS TAKEN - M3 MILITIA.

Hell of a lot of good
that
will do she thought.  She went to the side of the tube and opened a coffin lock and sealed up, checking her suit extra carefully since she was alone and dumped the air since she was in a hurry. They said the shuttle would be at the station within the hour. She clipped her line on and went to the outside end of the tube where the single doors were, which would be outside their airlock when the shuttle docked. There she wrote again in big block letters:

MILITARY ENTRY WILL BE RESISTED WITH LETHAL FORCE - NO FURTHER WARNING. M3 MILITIA.

They probably wouldn't believe it anymore than the other, she thought, but took a pix of it with her helmet camera and sent it to Jon also. Maybe she just didn't understand this psychological warfare stuff crap.

* * *

Jeff was extremely nervous with his new step mother. He wanted very much to get her approval and was worried about not knowing what her culture might consider offensive. They were working together to load her precious material in the quarter scale machine at the Lewis family dockage. It was a little harder to do in zero G, but worth it, because they would test it outside and know immediately if this scale worked and they could mount this unit on the Happy Lewis and move on to the other three. It made it all the harder his dad was not there, to help them get to know each other. He was off with the other owners of the Rock and all the friends and well regarded people they invited, to consider what they could do to hold on to their investment.

He was famous now for his broadcast on BBC. But they had yet to see if it would translate into actual support for a open schism with USNA authority. Jeff went on and on, prefacing everything he said with Nam-Kah with so many qualifications and apologies, that his normal quick and to the point manner was gone. Finally she laid her hand on his arm, making him start he was so jumpy. "Do you dislike me Jeff?" she asked, but without any tone of unhappiness in her voice.

"God, no. I don't even
know
you," he blurted out.

"And I don't know you," she agreed, "but how shall I ever, if you're terrified of me?"

He smiled a little bit and nodded. "But you'll tell me if I do something that makes you unhappy? So we can fix it instead of letting it get between us?"

"I promise. No silent resentments or evasions. Now, just talk to me
normal
, like you would your father or your friends. OK?"

"OK," he agreed and visibly took a deep breath and tried to relax. "Have you wandered what would happen if you could precipitate the same field collapse your device produces along a line, in a plane configuration instead, or as the spherical collapse of a volume? I'm wondering if there aren't some parallels for describing the matrix in Maxwell's equations. Now visualize this," he said, preparing to elaborate, his eyes getting a far away dreamy look and smiling for a change.

So this is normal?
Nam-Kah thought. Domestic life is going to be interesting in the Singh household, she concluded. Very interesting indeed.

* * *

Aboard the
Cincinnati
Art listened carefully to his commander's briefing as they approach docking at M3. He thought the man a pompous ass, but he was forty-six years old and every bit as hard and quick as Art, or any of the men in his squad. He liked to run the guys into the dirt in training, refusing to even look back, to see how many had dropped out. He'd like to get a DNA sample of the old boy some time. There were times he'd swear the man had nonhuman genome. Proof of it would strip him of his citizenship. But then he looked like he was on steroids too and they all had drug tests weekly, so he couldn't be.

He must be one of those fellows whose body was obliging and pumped out the steroids he needed just naturally, probably his genome was legal too, Art decided, with a small twinge of jealousy. The commander would be taking the first insertion, from the normal dockage on the South hub. After he had a secured area in sufficient depth into pressure, Art would take the second squad of twelve through and spearhead a drive for the Holiday Inn, to pick up the package waiting for them. He would take the hotel manager off away from his squad and dispose of him quietly and bring the man's bag back to the shuttle.

Only after the bag was securely onboard the shuttle would stand off - Art was not thrilled about that part of the plan - and the two squads would move to find and arrest the list they had, with photos of each person attached. Somewhere along the line he was looking for some personal payback too. He still resented the booby trap on his first recon. They also had a detailed layered map of the station loaded in their helmet displays and still pix they could bring up, of how many of the corridors and rooms should look. Earthside he was used to using a robot for point and surveillance, but here they were of no use until they were in the spun up section and then far enough out spin the robot had at least half of its normal weight for traction. Maybe later after they had control they'd haul a few in to patrol the outer corridors.  Nobody had developed a zero G fighting robot yet. But he also didn't really have a squad member skilled and trained at being forward point, since a machine took that position in their training.

He'd put Francisco out there. He was a poor boy from Mexico City, mean as hell and the nobody in the squad liked him very well. Nobody would hate Art if the slick caught it. Life in the Ciudad sounded like it would have prepared him for an urban style of combat anyway.

* * *

Jeff looked at Nam-Kah. "I think we'll have this buttoned up in about 15 minutes. Why don't we finish in our suits, so we can start pumping down the room to take it outside? Are you comfortable working in a suit?"

"I worked for three years on the Moon. I'm used to a Moon style suit, but I'm familiar with vacuum work in general and the safety aspects."

"Super, lets seal up. You check me close, because I'm not as experienced in a suit."

The final assembly was just bolting things back together, which they had needed removed to fill the central mechanism. The machine was improved from the original Nam-Kah had made in one important way. It had sufficient cooling it could cycle at tenth second intervals as a 100% duty cycle. They were bolting servo motors and cables back on. You could point it very much like the laser arm. The ships navigational computer could orient it at a point in space, from the radar data, or from GPS data they could point at a specific location on the earth's surface, or they could just look through the telescope and simply see where it was pointing. The optics were the weakest link. The telescope was a reflector with a half meter active surface mirror controlled by a nano mechanical elements. The individual sub-mirrors on its surface were smaller than the wavelength it was focusing so it should give theoretical perfection.

The software was trained to look for patterns and sort them out, so that after you had looked at a scene for a few seconds it would actually sharpen up. The lines drawn on a parking lot would get clear and the edge of a highway would become distinct, but it also tried to impose patterns even if there were none and you still had to recognize the filtering effect. You got a posterized effect where you could look at the surface of the ocean and after awhile something like sand dunes got a strange marbled look that wasn't really there, as the software struggled to impose a pattern.

After everything was bolted up Jeff ran a diagnostic on his pad, cabled to the control computer on the machine. It moved reliably in three dimensions. They checked the pressure and they had about five minutes before they wanted to crack the hatch open. Jeff went over and was checking his latest batch of foils, running in the nanoboxes.

"Still no thoughts what really makes this work?"

"What can I say? We're like Becquerel, looking at the exposed photographic film. We know there is a phenomenon, but we don't understand the underlying mechanism. We haven't even named it yet you know. I guess X-effect, would be as appropriate as X-rays were. But we can use it even if we don't understand it. It gives us a big head start on the Earthies, who don't even know about the effect we are working with. Who knows how long we will have it to ourselves?"

"I don't know. Have you published anything at all which would give them a lead?

She shook her head no.

"Then we better not for awhile, until we have some other hedges to maintain our political independence. I'm influenced by my father's dislike of politics," he admitted, "but I don't see we have much else but a few technical tricks as a lever. The
Happy Lewis
was very successful and lucky. But independence won't work based one tiny warship. They're going to need a demonstration of this, before they will talk seriously to us you know, don't you?" he asked.

"Oh yes. I've been thinking about targeting. After we test it and get it mounted in the
Happy Lewis,
we need to see what we have archived off the net for targeting. First order of business is anything which can reach us here. Space planes, launch facilities, anti-sat systems."

"Eddie says he'll have a ship ready to carry a projector too. It won't have the legs of the
Happy,
but it will be ready to use as fast as Dave can prepare it."

"Good, we're going to need it. He can upgrade it when it can sit idle that long."

"Easy says they have anti-sat systems on all the aircraft carriers, even the little submersible ones, which only carry a half dozen planes and some of the surface ships with extensive air defense, as well as some of the attack subs."

"Well at least it's a military target." She said looking pained. "I'm afraid we'll need to punch a grid through any of the aerospace shops building spacecraft. We can give them a few hours notice before we do it. It's not like they can roll it out and fly it away when it is half built. But the hangers at Edwards, the Cape and Groom Lake, we gotta smoke without warning, or they will fly the stuff away to other parts of the world. The less we have to hit USNA bases in other countries the better. Not that they have many bases left abroad. It's not like a few years ago when they were everywhere."