April 8: It's Always Something (10 page)

"I'm going to go see what the news service are saying," Jeff said. "Thanks for telling me."

April already had a couple on the split screen, and he was glad she didn't seem to be anguishing over it. If they showed too much ugly local coverage he'd encourage her to shut it off. But the European programs she had running were discussing it with no close video at all.

* * *

Kurt walked to the counter and looked. He could hear somebody talking in the back, but the lady Ruby wasn't in sight or he'd have thanked her again. He dumped his tray and stacked the non-disposables. Best to get to the clinic rather than wait until the last minute. You never knew when there might be a delay. Even if you have an appointment, a doc can be tied up dealing with an emergency at any time.

The Private bank of Home was right there on the corridor, and Kurt stopped to see if he could get some cash with his card from Singh's bank. There wasn't a cash machine like he'd expect on Earth, but the fellow at the first desk was happy to help him and cheerful. It was so un-Earthlike to have friendly service from a bank it jolted him again. He got four of the smallest denomination coins. It felt better to have some real money he knew people would accept.

"Do you want some bits?" Irwin asked, holding up a business card sized fold over.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Kurt admitted.

"Oh, they don't circulate much off Home yet. Although I've heard the casinos will take them at New Las Vegas. Are you new to Home?" Irwin asked, despite his System Trade Bank card."Some folks have Home accounts who have never stepped foot on Home."

"I've been away for months," Kurt explained. "And I won't be around but a few hours, before I head to the moon."

"Oh, they take them at Central," Irwin assured him. "In fact there's a branch of your bank there now. I'm not sure if they are negotiable at Armstrong, but after all, Central is an easy bus ride away."

Kurt held out his hand and examined the card Irwin gave him.

"Oh, it's to make change," Kurt figured out pretty quickly.

"Indeed. I'd compare it to the idea of coins, but it's really a bank note. There's no embedded value. We've rather reversed the use of coins and notes," Irwin mused.

"I've just come from North America, and my experience with fiat paper left a bad taste in my mouth. I'd rather hold a real coin or take the change in digital credits from somebody I trust."

"Oh no," Irwin said, emphatically. "These are fully redeemable for gold at the bank. When you present a hundred of them you can demand a coin just like the ones you withdrew today."

"Who guarantees them? My System Trade Bank?" He hadn't read all the tiny print on the inside.

"Yes, which means the banks partners," Irwin said. "It isn't a corporation. We don't have public corporations on Home, so the partners in any enterprise are responsible. There's not even the sheltering of limited partner liability, so you have a basis for solid trust."

"Singh is one of the partners then? I wasn't aware it wasn't just his bank. What if
he
goes broke?" Kurt asked. "That's still possible isn't it?"

"In theory. A currency offered by even a sovereign nation is subject to them going bust too. Miss Lewis and Anderson are also full partners. They share some dealing with Mr. Singh. But both have other holdings in their own names. Heather Anderson is the sovereign of Central on the moon. So her entire domain is technically all hers to draw upon. I assure you Miss Lewis has businesses and other holdings that are significant too, just not as well known to the public. Besides, it's Home. If you feel cheated, and want, you can call on any of them to give you satisfaction or meet you to duel. That's a powerful incentive to upright business dealings," Irwin said. "As you noticed, if North America goes bust lots of luck calling them to account."

"Yeah, I still have one foot on Earth," Kurt admitted. "In Mobile if I felt the bank cheated me they'd just sneer and say, 'Sue us.' Which is the same as telling me to go pound sand."

Irwin nodded. "Welcome back to civilization."

"Give me fifty of these bits," Kurt decided. "I'll try them out."

Kurt had to go past the clinic to a lower rent area to find a salon. Getting his hair buzzed off helmet short took a couple minutes and was cheaper than styling. He used five of the new bits to pay and gave the fellow an extra bit as a tip. He seemed happier now with that tip, than he had after Kurt had firmly turned down a long list of other services.

The clinic wasn't busy at all. The nurse practitioner seemed to be the receptionist too, and said she'd start doing his tests so the doctor could see him when done with his current patient. The tests seemed to be mostly remote scanning with only one finger prick.

Doctor Lee came in after a couple minutes and sat reading the screen from the testing for a good ten minutes before proceeding. He asked Kurt if he'd just had a large meal, and suggested he might have some gene mods if he was going to eat like that as a habit. Otherwise he'd probably be seeing him to restore pancreatic function, stabilize his hormones and lose some weight.

Kurt was young and flexible, but the doc still had him test his grip and strength at extension. He did reflex and hearing tests and a vision test, checking for color perception too. The medical he'd had before when hired for Mitsubishi hadn't been anywhere near as thorough. Kurt said as much to him.

He had Kurt strip and dimmed the lights, examining him with a hand held scanner that illuminated a few square centimeters at a time. He was very thorough, requiring him to lift his arms to scan his arm pits and his private areas, even scanning between his toes.

"Were you looking for skin cancer, doc?" Kurt asked.

"Yes, you've been on Earth and in fairly tropic latitudes. You've had sunlight exposure now and as a child. Some of the air pollution there also accelerates the process to develop skin cancer. I can detect it in scan several years before it may show up to the unaided eye or a blood test. And bluntly, injection sites, because there are designer drugs we don't have tests to reveal, but interfere with your ability to work. The synthesizers are always one step ahead of us.

"Also I'm checking for other common Earth diseases, bites, parasites, fungal infections and unhealed injuries. You have your hair nice and short, but we once did a physical on a fellow three days out from Earth who had a tick hidden in his thick hair. He had no idea, and they are filthy things. Are you aware you had an infection of Charleston fever recently?" Doctor Lee asked.

"I have no idea what that is, Doc," Kurt admitted.

"It's a bacterium, similar to Lyme disease, other Borrelia, Bourbon disease, Colorado fever, Heartland virus, Spotted fever, Malaria, Yellow fever, Zika, Dengue, or West Nile in its mode of transmission. It isn't definitively linked to ticks or mosquitoes,
yet
. But I personally expect it will be. The filthy things are a huge vector for both viral and bacteriological diseases." Lee frowned. "Or protozoan parasites," he added after thoughtful consideration. "That's what Malaria is. Damned filthy bugs spread
everything
. Probably stuff we don't suspect yet."

"Charleston is mild or asymptomatic for many healthy people. That's why it took such a long time to be recognized. When people commonly die from a disease it gets our attention faster. You probably thought you had a cold. You have a high level of the antibodies but not an active infection so you'll be fine. You have antibodies for a lot more serious stuff. You've had three kinds of flu, chickenpox, and seven typed rhino viruses," Lee revealed. "I don't see any indications you've ever had Mumps, TB or Diphtheria, and we've seen evidence of just about everything but Smallpox come through here."

"You make me wonder how I ever survived Earth," Kurt said.

"A lot of people
don't
," Lee agreed. "I may visit again if relations improve in the future, but you can be assured I will be very cautious where I go and what activities I enjoy. In particular, I doubt I will ever be visiting the tropics."

"Why does Mr. Singh pay for such a detailed physical?" Kurt asked.

"You have it backward," Lee informed him. "Mitsubishi detailed exactly what they wanted to pay for in my instructions. Jeff Singh just said use your professional discretion and do whatever you think is best and necessary."

"You know, if he respects a beam dog's experience with their job, like he does doctors, I may like working for the man," Kurt decided.

"Well, I'm done, and you pass. There is no medical reason why you can't work for him," Lee said. "You are typically healthy for an active young man of your age. That isn't to say you wouldn't benefit from a number of small changes in diet and habits. I can see you don't have an unhealthy taste for alcohol, or narcotics. You are also likely shorting yourself an hour or so of sleep a night. If you want a copy of your physical and a risk assessment, ask my assistant and she'll transfer it to your pad, send it to your com account or print it out for a bit. It will have some of those recommendations attached. Of course you would benefit from life extension therapies, but they would preclude you visiting many places on Earth again."

"I'm starting to wonder if I care about that," Kurt admitted, standing to leave. "Thanks Doc."

"You're welcome. Try to keep your helmet on straight," Lee joked. "It makes a hell of a mess for us to fix when you guys try to breath vacuum."

"Yeah, I'll keep that in mind," Kurt promised.

"You knew they'd be in an uproar," Chen said.

"I'm refusing any interviews," Jeff said. "I'm tired of having to reply to stupidity, or downright lying hostility. We have different standards; we don't
think
alike. What's to say?"

"On the plus side nobody has called for an Assembly to question you, or try to gain some public controls over private weapons," Chen pointed out.

"Not a Special Assembly, but I wonder if the issue might not come up when the regular one is held?" Jeff worried. "It might be easier to put it to people attached to other issues."

"Then all I can say is, be prepared. Have your answers well made and firmly in mind. Was there anyone you spoke to in the media who seemed reasonable to you?" Chen asked, backtracking a bit. "If you spoke to even one it might calm the others down to have something to report. I know how Earthies think," he warned. "A lot of them see silence as damning, reasonable or not."

"No, nobody had an intelligent question to put forth," Jeff lamented.

Chen thought on that a bit. "You sent notices of a conference call to quite a few news organizations. About thirty," Chen remembered. "You didn't take that many questions. Is there anybody who
didn't
ask anything you'd want to call up and give it a go again?"

"Do you know? There was a fellow from the Australian Video News Net. He didn't say a blessed thing, but I noticed he was particularly alert. His facial expressions caught my eye when we were listening to the others. I thought maybe I was imagining what I wanted to see, but he seemed as amused at the frivolous question as I was infuriated. But he didn't ask anything himself."

"If you call him up and offer an exclusive interview, what have you got to lose, but your patience?" He can hardly refuse to ask any questions without others to do it for him. You'll either find out you read him wrong, and he's another idiot, or it may be a productive session," Chen suggested.

"I may do that, but can you do some research and see what you can find out about the man in the next few hours?" Jeff asked. "I'd feel better knowing who I'm talking to."

"Sure, I'll look at public sources and see if I have any Australian insiders," Chen promised.

* * *

"I've never seen a fabricator with an articulated arm," Kurt said, surprised. "They always have a cross beam for rigid support, if not two of them, and the print carriage between them."

They were standing in suits outside, the huge 3D printer stage in front of them and the fifth section of a long crane-like arm being attached before the final print head coupling was attached. There was a bare steel rack to the side that would hold specialized print heads to lay various metals, ceramics, foams and glasses. Even heads to vacuum deposit thin films and do secondary heat treating.

"We want to build some vessels twenty meters long," Mo said. "If we built it the conventional way it will be enormous, but more importantly it would take about four times as much material and longer to build. Now, if we had to hold tolerances to a hundredth of a millimeter and produce a good surface finish we'd be building it that way. We'd have no other choice. The pieces we intend to make will be perfectly usable if we hold them to a tenth of a millimeter, and the surface doesn't need to be smooth. We're going to enamel some areas when we sinter them and attach various things with adhesives, so a bit of texture is actually advantageous to get a better grip on both sides."

"Both sides?" Kurt asked, unsure what he meant.

"A lot of this will be laying a hard surface on metal or ceramic foam," Mo explained. "It has good insulating properties and a very high Modulus. It accepts anchors and ribs nicely too. We will be erecting another print arm opposite this one so we can work on both sides of a foam core at the same time."

"How? Don't the inner and outer arms get in each other's way when they cross over? Kurt asked, using his own arms to illustrate the problem.

"Ah, yes they would," Mo agreed, "if they were working on an unmoving object, but the entire fifteen meter diameter stage rotates, and when done the entire rotary table slides off to the side on rails. We'll soon have another blank stage that slides in to allow a new object to be started while the completed object is rigged to be removed, or has secondary operations performed."

"What am I going to be working on first?" Kurt asked.

"You are going to dig a perimeter trench all the way around the machine a hundred meters deep and a meter wide. Then you are going to undercut sections and insert bearings. After the bearings are installed then the remaining sections will be cut out, and those sections will in turn have the second half of the bearings installed. In the end the entire block of stone will be floating, free to move in two dimensions independent of any moonquakes or disturbances from local human activities."

"I'm guessing you are confident the stone doesn't have any big faults running through it?" Kurt said.

"It was examined with ultrasound from four bore holes spaced out at the corners of your future trench. This isn't a natural bowl where we're sited. The regolith was removed and the rock cut flat. It will be domed over also, not for pressure, we need the vacuum, but to keep the direct sun off for thermal expansion. There are already problems we had to overcome with oscillation in such a long articulated mechanism. Fortunately most of those design problems have been overcome in cranes and atomic level manipulators. It's easier to just shade it all than to shield individual components," Mo said.

"How far will the monolith be able to move before it comes up against stops, and is there any way to get it back to the start location if it gets bumped over a few centimeters?" Kurt asked.

"Indeed, it senses the acceleration of a move as well as distance, and the real purpose is more to allow the print head to be withdrawn, and save the build, than to keep working through a disturbance. If it senses there is going to be significant motion it simply buys time to lift the print head away from the work. Your trench will be a minimum meter wide to hold equipment and allow access to service it. We certainly don't ever want to see the monolith move that far. There will also be recesses in the outer surface to facilitate a man in a suit turning around. It only can move about four centimeters before hitting gas shocks that buffer its motion. By the time it hits those, the print head should be safely withdrawn. Then it will have hydraulic rams to push it back on location," Mo said.

"You know, a lot of the people I've worked with would have told me to do my job and not worry about what is the engineer's concern when I ask so many questions," Kurt said.

"Perhaps that would save a few seconds now, and court disaster long term, which is a poor bargain," Mo said. "I'm an engineer, but I've been working way outside my area of training. Just about everybody here does. If you are here, well, Jeff doesn't hire stupid people. You may tell me a hundred things we've planned for and then the hundred and first will leave me saying I didn't think of that. Besides, if I don't let you get them out of your system, a little block of your mind will be pondering them all the while you are working on the trench. Better to address them than spare my feelings. I'm really
consciously
trying to leave all that Earth Think behind."

Kurt nodded. "I think I'm here for the long haul too. And I agree we need to do things differently. Look at what a mess Earth is now. I think I'll like working with you, Mo."

"Oh, you'll get your share of other bosses," Mo warned him. "We're so short handed we trade workers around all the time. But we can't afford somebody sitting idle for silly work rules or because they are above working in the cabbage mines."

"The cabbage mines?" Kurt asked.

"I don't even know the official name," Mo admitted. "maybe they have a sign in the corridor if you get assigned there. But that's what everybody calls the experimental farms. I might as well tell you...the seismic isolation cut you are going to be working on is already being called the
moat
. Just as well to inform you before they say it and you stand there looking cluelessly at them. The printer arm is the
finger
and the dome for which they are sinking footers right now is already
the lid
. They kept proposing other names for the arm, but I think they were just yanking my chain, teasing the Earthie. Once I took to ignoring it they dropped it."

"What happens when they install the other, uh...finger?" Kurt asked Mo.

"Who knows? They may be the east finger and west finger or the old finger and the new finger, they may name them Al and Fred for all I know. If you can name them first they'll probably accept whatever you coin. I'll just be happy if it's something I can repeat to my wife. You'll see what I mean when you meet the entire crew."

"I worked as a beam dog, remember? I know exactly what you mean."

* * *

Iaan Walsh was an excellent marksman, a seasoned security specialist and a guard to Colonel Allister who was the first among the council of colonels. His other qualification for the mission just handed to him was that he'd been recruited into God's Warriors while embedded in the command of Colonel Allister and remained there while all the chaos of the nation fracturing into factions proceeded.

Neither of the two factions splitting power retained or recruited from the Naval detail that previously guarded the President. There was entirely too much risk some nut case would take their oath to the constitution seriously, and have objections to a military government, no matter how 'temporary'.

He'd had to briefly claim allegiance to the Pennsylvania Patriots before they were absorbed into the Patriot Party and then into the Sons of Liberty. If there was any one skill in which he exceeded it was sincerity. He switched sides as easily and convincingly as his superiors. However Iaan was a deeply religious man, taught early at his mother's knee. He could see the merits of patriotism and admire the Patriot's sincerity, but without godliness it was hollow to him.

He'd seen the callous indifference to life Colonel Allister and his officers displayed without any shame. The only qualm he entertained was the thought that by assassinating the colonel he might be committing suicide. After prayerful and careful consideration he found solace in the examples of Samson and other godly men. If he died at the Patriot's hands that was on them, not him.

Iaan didn't know who his contact was, he'd just been left a note in his coffee mug, with instructions to pause and scratch his nose upon exiting his quarters if he had received the message. They did not say if he accepted the assignment, but he didn't expect that. He was after all a soldier under orders.

When Iaan stepped outside he paused to look around, savoring the day since it would likely be his last, and scratched his nose. He had to wonder from how far away he was being observed and how they could excuse remaining in a set position on base without arousing suspicion. Nevertheless, it was good his people had resources, even here.

It was late in the day before Colonel Allister was alone with a company commander. Lieutenant Sass had stepped out of the room. That was a shame because he detested the little weasel and would have shot him next after Allister, if the other guard gave him time.

Allister walked around the desk and stood directly between him and the other guard. That's what he'd been waiting to happen. He bent over shuffling through some documents. That reduced his profile so Iaan was looking at the top of the man's head and had no clear shot at his chest. He kept his hand still, aware he could easily telegraph his intend to the other guard. He'd wait until the man stood back straight from leaning over, and not only presented a fuller target, but obscured the other guard's view and field of fire to respond to him.

To his astonishment the other guard drew his weapon, seemingly unhurried, and shot Allister in the back of the head. He'd recovered from recoil and Iaan was at his mercy since he was just reaching for his weapon and the other man already had his pointed in his general direction. But the visiting commander was much closer to the shooter, and calling attention to himself by scrambling wildly to get his weapon clear of his holster.

The guard decided to shoot the closer threat first. It was a fatal error. He should have shot Iaan and
then
worried about the closer, but less competent threat. As slow as the commander was he still might have taken both of them. He did take the company commander down with a round through the chest when he'd barely cleared leather, and before he could start to raise his pistol. But it gave Iaan far too much time to respond. He tried, but failed, to bring his weapon back around to bear on Iaan.

Iaan put two rounds through the man's chest and another through his head as he slid down the wall. When the more heavily armed guards from the corridor burst in Iaan was pointing his weapon at the floor. He still almost got shot. He was cuffed and isolated, then interrogated even though the video from the room backed up his story.

It wasn't until almost three the next morning before Iaan was allowed to return to quarters. He'd finally been told the other guard had a suicide note in his pocket. Which meant most of his repetitious interrogation was senseless paranoia. The dead guard's family lived across the Bayou just north of the Pensacola base. The whole neighborhood had been swept away as badly as any hurricane could do, the foundations barely visible from an aerial survey. The man directly blamed Allister. Well, so did Iaan, though he'd never mention it. The whole bunch of them were insane to goad the Homies.