April (66 page)

Muños looked around like he was expecting objections after the last time, but he saw no problem and just said, "What is your first?"

"I'll advance the first and if it does not pass, I'll go home and reserve the second. I propose the motion of my grandfather be amended. I propose it may be too easy to find three people, especially relatives, who may be partial and vote a person privileges of majority. That may seem against my own interests, but I don't want a majority that is tainted and in doubt. I propose a person must have at least three
sponsors
, but also survive a vote that allows anyone in the community to express a nay to the application. This is my first proposal."

"How do you people say?" Muños asked again. It had an authoritative sound.

It found 1112 ayes and 75 nays. They liked it better.

"Do you still wish to propose the second then, as it passed?" Muños asked.

"Please. As there is not a time and place specified for this yet. I would like to ask if there are three people who will sponsor me now and if so, take it to a vote, so I know whether to fight this revolution, or take these guns off - she laid her hands on the laser and the Chinese pistol - and go home and play with my dolls."

"I believe the floor is open for sponsorships." Muños said.

Her father stood up and spoke, "I know April. I sponsor her unreservedly."

Her grandfather stood also, "I know April. She's ready."

Easy was waiting for him to finish, "She's my comrade at arms. Absolutely."

"Having three sponsors spoken," Muños said. "How do - "

"Objection!" Jon Davis bellowed over him, all the way from the back.

"Mr. Davis," Muños spoke surprised, rattled really by the volume from soft spoken Jon, "what objection can you have in the face of the vote? We have three sponsors and may proceed, may we not?"

"You may
not
," Jon assured him. "You
require
at least three sponsors. "I acknowledged the practical fact of April's majority to her weeks ago. And I won't be relegated to simply adding an affirmative vote, when it is my privilege to be listed as a sponsor. Take the full list of people who know her well and wish to stand as sponsor and then take a yes or no vote. That's how we do this."

"Your point is well taken," Muños said with a smile. "All who wish to stand as a sponsor, for the majority of April Lewis please enter an aye vote on your pads. Only ayes this vote as sponsors and then the aye and nays to affirm it or reject it next round. To put it formally, I guess I shall say: Who stands sponsor to April?"

Several apparently decided to take the standing part literally. Ruby stood and looked at April and Muños and pressed her pad. She saw Sylvia stand and a man from Jon's exercise group. A fellow from supply and a woman she dealt with regularly in housing. She had no idea Margaret and Theo, following the meeting on their pads keyed ayes, but her mother did not. When the thirty second quiet period ended, there were 37 sponsors on the pad. She had a hard time seeing it for the tears flooding her eyes and running down her cheeks.

"Somewhere way off she heard, "How do you people say?" again. This time the numbers were 393 to 73. Most probably voted based upon knowing and trusting her sponsors. She didn't think she knew four hundred people. Still a lot of abstentions and the whole idea surely offended many, but she was very happy with it.

Mr. Tibbet surprised her, by standing and asking to propose two items. He said. "Miss Lewis has used up her two proposals to clear some personal matters. I'd like to re-submit her prior thought we elect delegates to a legislature at large, who can show a body of 200 residents they are representing. I'd add that voters may withdraw their affiliation and if the representative drops below 200 supporters they are unseated and must seek to reform. I have heard several people refer to this as their home, in emotional and emphatic terms. While the physical structure is Mitsubishi 3, an object of corporate and private ownership and I have not heard any fool suggest nationalizing it, my second proposal is we call our political body, the nation we are forming, by the simple name of Home."

For some reason it struck a chord. There was an audible murmuring in the crowd.

On the matter of the legislature it went 892 to 272 and passed. On the matter of the name being Home it read 1311 to 71. Even Tibbet was surprised at the vote and later shocked to find he had secured a place in history as firm as John Hancock.

This first constitutional assembly of Home might well have lasted through the night. However just then Frank called Jon and informed him the problem with the
Cincinnati
was not over as he thought. There was an agitated maintenance worker, a fellow working in the North hub, who reported a group of armed men in space armor had swept in, from the same airlock Art had used to jump to the USNA shuttle a couple weeks ago. He was grabbed out of the corridor where he was washing the wall and performing maintenance on lights and such and stuffed with cuffs on into a maintenance closet and the door jammed shut behind him.

The men had taken his pad and smashed it out in the hall, but apparently the concept of a janitor's closet having a com and data access, was not the norm on Earth. All he knew was they were headed South and seemed in a hurry. Jon immediately asked his people to ambush them from the side corridors and hurried to intercept. April, Heather and several others suspected immediately what their objective might be and sent a short message to Neil. "Holiday Inn." "I know," Neil replied with a semi cryptic, "I'll check them in." Perhaps it was simply his droll humor.

Chapter 31

Neil walked around the counter and checked the Holiday Inn logo which decorated the front of the checkin desk. Last night before setting a watch for Harris, he'd reinforced the desk on which it was mounted. A thick aluminum plate inside, behind the plastic logo strengthened it now. The counter was fastened to the deck with generous large bolts and he had satisfied himself on their sturdiness. Behind the aluminum plate, he had filled the desk with boxes of supplies from the storage rooms. Soup and powdered drinks, toiletries and pamphlets. As much mass as he could find to pile in the cabinet.

The logo hid a master study in improvised munitions. They had no more claymore mines, but he had pulled the flimsy plastic front off the sign and filled the rear with a sheet of plastique. He carefully spread all of the C4 compound from two demolition charges, building each quadrant of the sheet into a mound with a knot of DET cord buried in each. The cords all met in the middle on a main line with four double lark's heads pulled snug around it. The main ran to an electric blasting cap, where it was doubled against the copper tube and tied off.

An assortment of odd nuts and bolts Housekeeping swept up and a large number of used button batteries that were awaiting recycling, were pressed in the surface of the explosive like chocolate chips studded on cookie dough. They would become missiles every bit as lethal as the special balls or pyramids a commercial Claymore used. With the flimsy plastic front cover clipped back on the front, he checked the firing circuits and got a green light. He removed the tester, kept the familiar clacker in his hand and relaxed awaiting company.

* * *

April and Easy set an ambush at the second ring, where the corridors were close together and they could shoot from one intersection to the next. She and Easy took opposite sides of the next intersection spin wise, about fifty meters away. She laid her captured pistol from the Chinese fellow right in the middle of the intersection they were ambushing. They figured nobody could resist stopping to pick it up and look at it. They had their portable shields deployed behind the corners on each side and were holding their lasers around the corner watching the pistol with spex.

She had set her suit exterior to a gray and black, to match the corridor walls. An older man and a younger one ran up behind them and hunkered down. She looked over her shoulder at them and they were obviously father and son. Both carried equipment, the father with something that had wheels and both had old fashioned soft body armor which closed with Velcro straps.

"How close are the Earthies? Do you know?" demanded the father.

"Pretty close. They should be here any second." April assured him. "Please don't distract me when I have to shoot," she asked, concentrating to talk and watch at the same time.

"What are you guys shooting?" he asked.

"High powered lasers."

"Hot damn! Let me get just one shot in please and my boy will probe them now. I'll take the risk to cross," he scrambled to the other side and lay on the floor by Easy. His weapon was big and visibly heavy, with two small rubber wheels on the back so you could push it like a hand cart.  He had a two footed tripod at the front and April could see two massive concentric coil springs within a square frame of some sort of metal tubes. She heard an electric motor whining at full speed, but the springs very slowly pulled back in compression. It took at least a full minute to take the springs all the way back, before there was a sharp latching sound and the motor shut off. April glanced at the boy still on her side.

"What the hell is the contraption he's lugging around?"

 "My dad's a machinist and fabricated his weapon over the last two days, figuring the Earthies were coming. It's sort of a crossbow without the bow"

April watched him push a gray missile about a hundred-fifty millimeters long and maybe twenty in diameter in the front. It had little shiny tail fins at the back, on the cone of a flared skirt, which was perhaps twice the diameter of the long body. It rather looked like pictures she had seen online, of the tank killing dart a discarding sabot carried from an antiarmor canon.

"Solid tungsten rod, with a tungsten carbide point and a half carat diamond tip sintered in," he informed her. "No explosives," he lamented, "But it masses pretty good and dad said if you can scratch it you can crack it. We figure it will toss it at about three hundred to three-fifty hundred meters a second. It should penetrate and then when the cone on the rear gets to the surface, if it doesn't pull through it should be a jolly jolt in any case. We just didn't know how strong their armor is."

"It's just an armored suit, not a frigging battle tank," April told him unbelieving, realizing she was in the presence of truly over the edge weirdness with these two. The missile had to weigh several kilograms. It would hit like having a ground car dropped on you. April suspected it would go through a shuttle lengthwise like a wet paper sack, much less a suit.

"Oh, good. You must think it's enough then," he smiled, taking it for approval.

The boy pulled the object he was carrying out from under his arm and April realized it was a remote control model air car. He punched a command in his pad and held the toy out at arm's length where it spun its rotors up and went into a hover. It hung there to gave him time to pick the pad up and then took off surprisingly fast for the target area. When it reached the other corridor, it banked around the corner at a steep angle and disappeared. April looked down at his screen which showed the on board camera and realized he was flying it inches from the ceiling. There was an indistinct clump of darkness far down the corridor and it grew quickly into a cluster of combat space suits jogging along.

"Hey, you spotted them," April congratulated him. "Don't you think you better pull it back before they shoot it down?"

He ignored her, with a faraway look on his face and the scene telescoped into close-up in seconds. The lead figure did raise a weapon and the whole view tilted at a crazy angle then full inverted as the toy swooped down the wall, faster than the bright flashing muzzle of the weapon could follow it.

It transversed the floor as it corkscrewed and swooped around the lead figure, who spun sideways trying to track it, as the model twisted in the air of the corridor. There was just an instant of zoomed image of the second suit before impact, just a fleeting impression of a couple eyeballs wide with surprise through the faceplate, before the screen went dark. The floor transmitted a little thump, like someone stomping their foot and there was a brief orange flash from the North corridor.

"Just an itty-bitty little shaped charge, they use to punch rivet holes in girders," the teenager said. "About the size of a AA cell," he said, holding up his fingers to illustrate, "but it can't be very good to have go off right on your helmet face plate."

April went back to her spex shaken by the image. She didn't want to be seeing those eyes in dreams like she knew Easy had. She had burned a ship knowing there were men inside, but after she hadn't been near as cheerful as this kid. It bothered her. Neither did she realize she had labeled him a child in her mind and he was probably two years her elder. She forced her attention back to watch the spex image in her heads up and see the father across by Easy just fine also.

The first trooper came sliding into the intersection and looked at the Chinese pistol. He was cautious enough to prod it with the muzzle of his weapon before reaching for it. As he bent over April laid her cross hairs on his torso, but a second running suited figure bumped into his hip and knocked him to his hands and knees, going down himself but sliding past the first. There was a ringing metallic -THRUMP!- from the father's homemade weapon and he slid back a good half meter or more on the floor, from the recoil. He left the weapon there and rolled to cover back behind Easy with a moan.

The dart caught the suited man down on his hands and knees, right behind the arm pit. It picked him up, heavy suit and all and rolled him end over end in the air at least three times that April saw, limbs spun out from the impact. He was actually carried out of the intersection into the side corridor. The dart  passed through both layers of space armor and soft filling, cone punching a 40mm hole straight through everything without changing trajectory very much. It continued down the hall leaving a dark splash trickling down the corridor wall near the junction and had the good fortune to catch on a door frame instead of ricochet.