April 6: And What Goes Around (32 page)

"The lock is
empty and the outer hatch is open," she said.

Barak just nodded,
unsurprised. He'd figured that out back in his cabin. Deloris kind of sagged
and put her hands on her knees. Barak thought she was going to vomit for a
moment.

"
Yuki-onna
,"
Barak said. "The commander exited the airlock. Can you override the
controls and close the outer hatch for us?"

"The controls
do not show an activation. The outer hatch can only be open if the emergency mechanism
was used to manually crank the hatch open. Doing so disengages the servo motor.
It has to be manually cranked back closed."

Barak thought
about that and looked as sick as Deloris. How
determined
to die did you
have to be to keep cranking that hatch open, holding your breath as the
pressure dropped?

"How can we
get it closed now?" Barak asked.  Deloris was reading the note.

"
Yuki
,"
he added at the silence.

"You will
have to suit up and pump down the suit room to enter the airlock and close the
hatch."

"Specialist
Wrigley and I shall do that,
Yuki-onna.
"

"I'm calling
Alice to tell her," Deloris said. She turned away and used her com.
"Alice says to explain explicitly to
Yuki-onna
what this means. She
probably still doesn't get it."

Deloris took a
deep breath and composed herself to speak to the ship. You had to say exactly
what you meant. It was much like speaking to a small and very literal child.

"
Yuki-onna
,
acting Captain Dobbs exited the ship without a suit. It is impossible to
survive outside without one. She is dead. I have never been supplied a com code
for the owners. They will have to be notified she is dead. Can you do that?"
Deloris requested.

"I am sending
such a message. My command interaction procedures indicate I must inquire of
them who is to be appointed Acting Commander now. I will make a general
announcement when they reply. My action tree demands a cause of death be
included in such a notification. Would you supply that please?"

"
Yuki
,
tell them it was suicide," Barak said. That made Deloris look at him
sharply. Probably because he hadn't read the note. Really, what other
explanation was there?

"Do I
want
to know what the note says?" he asked
Deloris. She just handed it to him to read.

"Jaabir said I was stupid if I thought he was going to take the
blame. He said I'd never do ship work again. He couldn't even sit up and he was
threatening me. I believed him and panicked. He looked very surprised. I'm
sorry. There's no fixing it now."

"Let's suit
up," Barak suggested, and handed the note back. "Alice will want us
to pump the suit room down hard so we don't waste air."

Deloris just nodded agreement.

* * *

Heather looked at
the list of messages over breakfast. The forty six messages from Earthside
interests she highlighted and sent to her secretary. There wasn't any from a
hostile power. She cared about what her enemies had to say much more than
non-space powers or commercial interests.  The Tongans were an exception and
the occasions on which they found it necessary to send her a message could be
counted on one hand. There was nothing from Jeff or April, her brother hadn't
sent anything in three days. He was saying very little since his trip had taken
a bad turn. That was probably safest.

Among the local
messages she sent three off to her secretary without opening them. They were local
people who had a track record of bothering her with unimportant matters. Only
one worked for her and the value of his services outweighed the fact he was a
pain in the butt. She'd told him face to face that she routed all his messages
to her secretary so he could direct them there with the same effect. He either
didn't believe her or thought it a joke.

The other two were
subjects who owned land they bought from her. One simply thought she needed her
advice on almost every aspect of day to day operations, and the other had a
single complaint that she aired over and over without any modification. She
wished the debris from the Chinese attack removed from her property. Right now.
Well, who didn't? Nothing else would satisfy her and she seemed of the opinion
that the squeaky wheel got greased. Actually Heather had made sure her parcel
would be the very last one cleared. Heather was of the opinion that most
sovereigns of history would have had the woman executed in some gruesome manner
instead of displaying the patience she had. She just deleted those two messages.

That winnowing left five messages to actually examine and possibly
answer. The one that caught her eye was Mo Pennington. He owned a lot in
Central and two lots in outlying plats that had few other owners. He had in fact
proposed and laid out the boundaries and marked them on his off hours in
exchange for the lots. It would probably prove be a very good trade for both of
them in five or ten years. All it cost her was the rover hours and she
established a solid claim on territory twice again the area of her initial
development. He very rarely bothered her and was always succinct.

Heather,

I have some thoughts and a proposal for pursuing further food production
in spite of limited shipment of organics from Earth. I believe the matter is
too complex to address with a brief message and desire a face to face audience
so there can be a give and take discussion. There is no short term urgency
about the matter, but I'd like to see you within the week if it is convenient.

Mo P.

It was refreshing than somebody assigned a realistic urgency to what they
wanted. It also pleased her that he used her name in ordinary business instead
of awkward attempts at courtly language.

Mo,

If you would care to join me for supper at my residence this evening at
1900 we can discuss your proposal. If it can't be covered in the span of a meal
and an additional hour or so then I will insist you distill it to a written
proposal with a summary. If you have other obligations this evening please
propose an alternate evening.

Heather,

The return message showed up less than a minute after she hit send.

Heather,

Confirming – Meeting your residence this evening at 1900 is excellent.
Thank you.

Mo P.

Mo had been one of
Jeff's better ideas. He was a mining engineer, a Canadian, and had proved
inventive and adapted very well to the lunar environment. He'd been blackmailed
by Earth agents into bringing location devices in to allow their facilities to
be easily marked and ranged from lunar orbit. When Jeff discovered them, Mo had
acted as a double agent for a time and then defected. His family was on Home
until such a time as Central had more amenities, and now they could never
return to North America as they had planned.

One proof of Mo's
expertise was the fact the deep tunnels he'd designed and helped bore had
survived the Chinese nuclear attack. That was nearing two years ago and they
were continuing to dig deeper all the time. When they got down where the
natural temperature of the rock was a shirt sleeves environment they would slow
their downward pace and spread out.

Heather actually looked forward to talking with him.

* * *

"Tell me how
screwed we are," Barak invited. At least they could speak freely now
without resorting to helmet talk sign language or typing messages on their
pads.

"It's not
that bad," Commander Deloris Wrigley said. Barak's face said he didn't
believe it.

"I've been
talking to the owners. The lag time is long enough we decided to just keep
talking from both ends. We number the topic blocks and when we stick a new
statement in our end we reference which of their previous statements it is we
are addressing. It works surprisingly well."

She looked at his
frown and had a sudden suspicion. "Are you having problems with
me
as commander?"

That actually shocked
Barak. At least it wiped the frown off his face. "Not at all! If they had
asked me I'd have said you are the only logical choice. I'm not qualified and
Alice here volunteered the same thing about you without me asking her at all.
I'd just like a commander that can
fly
the damn thing."

Alice just nodded
to verify that.

"We've agreed
to a work-around," Deloris told them. "The first couple hours they
spent telling me how to establish administrative authority over the computers
and setting my own passwords.  I had to be shown what I could do with those
permissions. Then they offered me new contract terms. But then they gave me
several choices. They laid it on me alone to accept or not. I will bear all the
responsibility as master if I accept so they didn't ask you two. If we wanted
to back the
Yuki-onna
off the snowball and come home they would help us
as much as possible by offering advice and remote programming and navigation.
That would pretty much bankrupt the operation and we'd get our straight pay with
no bonuses."

"And forever
have our names attached to a failed project even if we survive," Alice
said.

"That, and
we'd miss the better terms they offered. If I can get us back with the snowball
and ship intact they offer a double bonus for all of us. They also spoke with
the sanctioning body and they agreed that if I pass the deep space pilot's exam
within two years of returning they will credit all our flight hours to my
record."

"
All
your flight hours? Not just the hours you stand watch on the bridge?" Barak
asked.

"
All
of them. Think about it... At this point we're always on call with no backup,
so why shouldn't we have the credit for on call hours? I figured I have a
little leverage here so I bargained for you two also. Barak, you have the
opportunity if you wish to get a ticket for the number two seat with the same
terms. With those hours and another couple jobs you can expect that they
wouldn't deny you a test for master much sooner than usual. I'll expect you to
be on the flight deck with me whenever we maneuver if you want that.

"I knew Alice
isn't interested in a command line career, so I got her a similar deal to be
licensed as a Master Engineer
full book
– Earth to orbit, planetary
landing, orbit to orbit and deep space. There are only about a dozen people
with that licensing status. As they said, if you can bring it back you've shown
you can
do
it under the worst of circumstances."

"Sweeeet...
" Barak said, drawing it out.

"I want to
sit in the control room with you guys when you do a burn," Alice said.
"I don't want to be strapped in my bunk down here all alone."

"Why not?
It's not like you'd have duties when we maneuver," Deloris agreed readily.

"Thanks,"
Alice said, relieved.

"It's not at
all like we're landing on a moon here and need to have inputs to the controls
real time. You know, back when they went to the moon, first couple times, they
didn't have enough computer capacity on the Apollo to navigate. They had to
sent their data back to Earth and have them transmit the course corrections to them.
They did similar delayed commands to unmanned deep-space probes early in the
century. No reason at all they can't do it for us."

"Just to be
clear, Deloris. I take it you
did
accept it, from the way you are
talking?" Alice asked.

"You bet. It's
going to take me about three days to get checked out,  doing star sights. The
system isn't fully automated. I have to sight at least one star and then let it
run a self check. With Jupiter filling half the sky it may need a second or
even a third star to establish orientation. I have to run it three times at
regular intervals, but the second and third time it should run off the main
star."

"Then what
happens?" Barak wondered.

"After they
process that data they send us a burn sequence," Deloris said. "It
will point us up out of the plane of Jupiter's rotation where there isn't as
much stuff floating we might run into. We'll do everything slower than we would
have with a certified pilot. They'll keep teaching me stuff while we coast
along slowly. The guy teaching me said we could be off line twenty degrees that
burn and it wouldn't matter in the end. Then when we're clear of the Jupiter system
we turn, do a new reading and start another slow burn towards Home in-system. We
do a small correction, then again in a week. If we are aimed right on the third
navigation check we do a longer burn and that's our last burn pointed in
system. We'll roll her and then it gets boring then for a few months. That's
the short version."

"This is the
easy end though isn't it?" Barak asked.

"Yes,"
Deloris agreed, "but when we approach the Earth – Moon system we will have
a lot less speed of light lag to deal with when they advise us, and they will
be able to locate us by both our radio signals and we have a laser in stores
that we could deploy. When we are really close they'll be able to see us on
radar and guide us very exactly. When we're pretty much at rest to them in a
trans lunar orbit within a few days flight time from Home they can send a
shuttle out with an experienced pilot and navigator team to nudge us into the
final halo orbit on the L2 side."

"I'd say you
got us a pretty good deal," Alice said. "You could have just taken
their sweetener for the command slot and not argued for us at all. Thank
you."

"Do you have
any problems with the program?" Deloris asked, looking at Barak. "If
you have any reservations or complaints - speak now before I talk to Home
again."

Barak smiled. "What are your orders, Commander?"

"Good evening,
Heather." Mo looked nervous. Why would he fall back into that mode? Was it
a mistake to invite him to her private space? She hoped he wasn't going to
start addressing her as Your Majesty or something. He wasn't sworn to her even
though he owned property in her realm. He was Jeff's hired man and a citizen of
Home now. She waved him to a chair in sight of the kitchen. He sat but stiff
and tense.

"I made
spaghetti. It's a favorite in my family. I hope you like that OK?" Heather
asked.

"That will be
a treat. I haven't had it in months. Different sorts of restaurants are one of
the few things I occasionally miss about Earth," Mo said. "We had a
Vietnamese and a Hungarian place we frequented in our old neighborhood."

"I'm afraid
you're getting bottled sauce with a few spices added and pouch meatballs,"
Heather said.

"That's still
a big step up from the self-heating meals I've been having sitting on the edge
of my bunk," Mo said smiling a little. "I don't want to go to the
cafeteria in my suit liner and I'm out of time and energy to get cleaned up and
go back out by the time I get in."

The cafeteria
wasn't much, just six tables and a tiny kitchen. But it served better meals
than out of a self-heating can. Between Heather's own employees and some lot
owners still in temporary shelter, there were thirty four people living centrally
in connected pressure. Two families were living at depth in tunnels under
Heather's land because the modular housing they towed from Armstrong was
destroyed or buried in the Chinese attack.

A few others lived
in connected pressure because their work didn't permit them to live on their own
land and commute. Not only did they have no fast elevator system to the depth
they were at now, but there still were not any small personal vehicles to be
had. The traffic system and vehicles were designed, and the engineering standards
issued by royal decree. They just never had opportunity to make them  before
the Chinese attack covered their roads with debris. They would be manufactured in
time, when the roads were cleared. The hand built bus that had connected them
to Armstrong briefly was now sitting waiting on their surface streets to be
cleared.

"That's
awful," Heather said of eating canned meals. She was genuinely concerned.
Mo was an asset and anything that wore his morale down was very bad. "We have
kids living in pressure who would probably do courier work cheap if they just
knew there was a market. They could run a hot meal to your room from the cafeteria.
They probably don't think to ask because they lived under strict North American
law in Armstrong. They didn't ignore it here like we did on M3 even before the
revolution. I will drop a hint to some parents," she promised.

"I never
thought to ask either," Mo admitted. "I guess my brain is stuck on
Earth-think a little bit too. My son has turned into quite the entrepreneur on
Home, so you'd think I would have adjusted, but it didn't occur to me."

"What does he
do?" Heather asked Mo.

"He buys old
spex and com pads from folks. It seems like most people get new ones often, whenever
there's a new feature they like. Most of the time they aren't worth the time to
try to sell them. But if Eric's standing right there offering cash they'll dig
it out of the drawer they tossed it in. People still find it hard to actually
throw it away if it still works fine. The new people coming in are shocked at
the prices for everything and happy to economize on something. He sells some to
Earth because the down leg shipping is cheap."

"I'm aware
your daughter already has quite a reputation as an artist," Heather let
him know.

"That's one
we didn't see coming," Mo admitted. "She always was sketching stuff.
Pictures of fancy clothing mostly. But she was a discipline problem when we
lived on Earth. The school never saw her as having any artistic talent. In fact
she got poor grades in basic art and then couldn't get in the more advanced
classes. My wife has shown me articles from Earth denouncing her work as
simplistic and childish, but people sure seem to be willing to pay serious
money for it."

"On Earth
that would be seen as a negative in academic society," Heather pointed
out. "If the great unwashed masses like it then it can't have any value.
Only the praise of their scholastic peers matters."

"Well, she
doesn't seem to be pining for their approval," Mo said.

"Good. I'd be
disappointed if she paid attention to such foolishness," Heather said.

"I have to
admit. I haven't been gone from Earth all that long. But I'm already looking at
the news feeds and thinking I can't believe I used to accept what they said
pretty much automatically. Now they sound like they are raving crazies most of
the time," Mo said, making a twirl at his temple. "But if I said that
to the people I used to work with down there I can just see the looks they'd
give me."

"So sad, now
you are oppressed under my iron fist," Heather said.

"Oddly enough
I think you are capable of doing the iron fist thing," Mo said, actually
making a fist. "It's just not scary because from everything I've seen you
won't do it for some
stupid
reason that doesn't make any sense to anybody.
Everybody from Armstrong is very happy you smashed their punitive force with an
iron fist and didn't let them be dragged back to a North American jurisdiction.
Even the ones in temporary shelter. They are certain things will get better.
They had no such hope back at Armstrong. Things were so bad there some of them
were near giving up and going back down to the Slum Ball."

The tension Mo
showed when he arrived seemed to have passed.

"That's the
nicest thing anybody has said in awhile," Heather said, "So, if you
aren't scared of me why were you all nervous when you came in?"

"Oh that. I
guess because I'm just a mining engineer and I keep expecting someone to tell
me I shouldn't be doing robotics and civil engineering. Now I'm going to advise
you on something and I'm not even sure what discipline to label it.
Environmental engineering? Process engineering?" Mo asked.

"All we care
is if it works, Mo. We'd take your advice for just about anything if you
display general competence. We're not stupid and we're going to run any ideas
past other on Home and Earth before we undertake any big commitment of time and
money. I'd take your advice on making spaghetti if you can show me a better way
to do it," Heather said, "and I'm pretty sure you aren't certified as
a chef."

"Good. I'm
encouraged you'll get other advice. That takes some of the pressure off."
Mo said.

"Come sit
here, it's ready and no pressure to talk business while we enjoy it,"
Heather said.

"Oh my, you
have wine," Mo was impressed. There was a plastic carafe of red. Glass was
just too heavy to justify lifting it from Earth. Heather served the pasta
separately, like her mother would, with a big blob of butter melting on it and
the sauce and meatballs in the pan she used to heat it. Her serving dishes and
table space were very limited. They had grated cheese and pepper flakes in
little foil packs, but she wouldn't serve on plastic plates and had metal
silverware. Given how she was raised she had limits to her practicality.

"OK, you're
right I'm not a chef," Mo admitted. "What did you add to make this so
good?"

"Commercial
sauce," Heather reminded him. "but good stuff, Midi brand from North
America. I added a little extra garlic, a tiny bit of anchovy paste, a tad of
basil and tarragon, maybe a teaspoon of honey and five of those little dark
chocolate chips like they put in cookies."

"Amazing.
Chocolate? Anchovies?" He repeated, disbelieving.

"Those sort
of things you add in moderation. You don't want them to stand out or take over,
but they add to the complexity. A lot of what we buy is intended for the
sportsman and camping market. The quality tends to be much better than
emergency food. Don't be shy, take seconds," Heather invited.

He had another
full plate serving and she had just a little more. Eventually he sighed and
leaned back in his chair. That was the first she was sure he was over being
uncomfortable.

"Now, tell me
what is so complicated you couldn't just send me a text," Heather said.

"I'm aware
you have plans to move steadily toward food independence. Jeff made me aware I
should start talking with experts at inside cultivation on Earth to know how to
lay out chambers and tunnels," Mo said. "Then later he told me to
speak with the French who were interested in doing the same thing. We really
have it easier than Earth in a lot of ways. We don't have to worry about pests
and disease as long as we don't introduce them. On Earth it's a struggle to
bring in air and water and have workmen in and out without introducing
problems."

"And if we do
have contamination we can pump a tunnel back to vacuum," Heather said.

"Yes, and we
can make our own air, water is harder but we have some that can be mined in
dark craters. At least enough until we have a regular supply from the outer
system," Mo said.

"But we don't
have biomass," Heather said. "We're carbon poor and there is no extra
lift capacity. Earth is so messed up right now nobody is even taking standby
status freight. I wish I'd had a sack of charcoal on standby for every shuttle
flight, but it's too late now. They're struggling to lift priority loads. So we
have everything we need but enough carbon dioxide for the plants. Eventually we
can recover most of it from sewage and mulching crop waste, but we lack the
tons we need to
start
a large recycling system going. We can't do hydro
or build soil without organics."

"Exactly,"
Mo agreed. "Eventually, long term, we can send ships to bring back
hydrocarbons or carbon dioxide from Jupiter or beyond just like they are doing
water now."

Heather thought
briefly of reminding him the first snowball wasn't back yet and that the second
expedition was having troubles. After considering it she didn't see how that
would help and it was confidential so she stifled it.

"What I want
to propose is a stopgap," Mo said. "We have three million cubic
meters of rock and regolith to back fill. It contains anywhere from fifty to
two hundred parts per million carbon. We should process the material to remove
that carbon. You already want to separate and stockpile the iron. I agree since
it will be a considerable asset in time and cost little to do so. We should
extract the carbon too."

"Yes, but the
iron is easy to separate  magnetically," Heather said. "How much of a
process is getting the carbon out? Is it going to involve milling and chemical
extraction?"

"That's the
beauty," Mo said. "All you have to do is heat it and it and the
majority of it is released as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane gas."

"Enough to be
worthwhile
?" Heather asked Mo.

"As I said. It
varies from fifty to two hundred parts per million."

"That doesn't
sound like much at all to me," Heather said.

"But Heather,
if our material runs at the median concentration it means three thousand
tons
of carbon in just our back-fill. Plenty to stock a closed system and buy us
time. If we need to we can send a group to set up mining in some of the dark
craters. That would give us more water and I wouldn't be surprised if the same
areas have higher carbon content too."

"Would we
have to divert some of our robots doing back-fill to run a remote mining
operation?"

Mo shook his head.
"No, because we will reach a point soon where we have as many robots
working as the road network will support. Then we just replace the obsolete
ones that wear out. We wouldn't send the robots to a dark crater however, we'd
send an automated robot
maker
or two."

Heather thought
about that a bit. "You can handle and convert the carbon monoxide easily?
That stuff makes me nervous in a sealed environment."

"We can burn
it to carbon dioxide through a catalyst screen. We'll do it physically isolated
from environmentally controlled cubic," Mo assured her. "The carbon
dioxide liquefies easily to transport it if we do the dark crater operation.
It's in the ideal form to release for plants."

"I've
continued speaking with Jeff about this," Heather said. "We also want
to have a yeast tank operation. They've developed some strains of yeast that
can be processed to something people actually want to eat – not just survival
food. But without the biomass we weren't going to be able do it because we had
no feedstock."

"Hydroponic
beets are an
excellent
feed stock for tank yeast," Mo said.

"You've been
researching this deeper than you're admitting," Heather said.

Mo blushed.
"I'm still no expert. But I had to be certain it would work as a package
before proposing it."

"What I'd
like you to do is make a couple prototypes. I imagine the transport robots won't
each have an extraction apparatus will they?" Heather asked.

"No. We don't
really need to change the design of the scoop and move units. We just add a
mill at the edge of the crater to extract the iron and carbon. Then when the
bin gets full of processed material it gets thrown in the crater," Mo
said, his cupped hand doing a forward toss, "So it doesn't build up a slope
to the edge, and make us periodically move that unit forward to a new lip. The
material will be loose and that's a dangerous operation to do."

Heather nodded.
"We'll want a prototype, and a test unit to transport to a dark crater and
sample there for carbon, iron and water extraction. Build that unit with weight
and dimensional limits in mind for transporting it. I'd like it to fit in one
shuttle load. I'll need a budget proposal and a short description of the
operation for Jeff and whomever he decides to consult. When can you have that
for me?"