April 8: It's Always Something (13 page)

"Sorry," Heather said, embarrassed. "We have a couple small security robots we're testing, that patrol the administrative cubic to keep out other tiny drones and spy bots. They usually avoid being seen. We haven't mentioned them publicly until we see how they work out. If they are released in the full public spaces then of course we'll have to tell everyone."

Kurt just nodded, rattled again all over.

When the coffee arrived he wasn't offered cream or sugar. Apparently they both took it black and didn't keep the condiments on hand. Perhaps didn't even think about needing them. He took a sip and tried not to peer around the room looking for the creepy little bot.

Kurt was halfway through the best American style coffee he'd had in years when the first witness arrived. He didn't recognize the man, and he still had on a paper isolation suit over his clothing. Chances were he was involved in the new enterprise of raising plants. He took a seat at the bench against the wall and didn't have any questions. Kurt noticed he wasn't offered coffee.

Mo, Kurt's section boss, came in and frowned when his eyes fell on the bandages. Kurt hadn't even started to worry about what he was going to do if they didn't put him against a wall and shoot him. It was just a temporary bandage and a blood clotting pad held against it by a sterile ball that looked very much like a tennis ball. The whole thing was covered with a huge pad and about ten times as much tape as he'd have used. It looked bulky and he'd have trouble, dressing and eating even after they reduced the size of the bandage and sealed it up . No way it was going inside a suit glove any time soon. The doc had told him he needed to do some minor surgery before he closed it up permanently. Unless they tossed him out the airlock first.

The next two people to come in were dressed casually. Kurt suspected they were office workers, until Heather introduced them by name and indicated the fellow in the paper suit was a biologist recently from Bangladesh, the two in casual clothes, a man and a woman, were scientists who had defected from Armstrong. The man obviously hadn't had any Life Extension Therapy, a fact Kurt was surprised how easily he recognized now.

Kurt noticed the precise word Heather used about them too...defected. That seemed a plus for his side of things. It struck Kurt that
all
of them were considerably over his pay grade and probably his social class. As much as spacers seemed to
have
any social classes. A research scientist certainly made more money than a prep cook. As much as money could ever substitute for class.

Heather showed them all the video with the audio synced to it, explaining the origins, but stopped it after the shot of Greg King's face, frozen on his smug expression as soon as his words about Kurt's sister were out of his mouth. She didn't show them his attack, which was fair, since that wasn't pertinent to evaluating the threat implied.

"Do you have that son of a bitch in custody?" The male scientist asked.

Heather hesitated, and then answered that they did. It was true after a fashion.

"Then I vote you
hang
him," Mo said with a snarl.

Heather was shocked not only at the suggestion but at the expressions on their faces which ranged from sullen to actively hostile.

"Mo, you're an engineer. You should know hanging at Lunar gravity isn't practical," Heather said.

"So it might take a few days," Mo said. "That's a feature not a bug."

The female scientist was slowly nodding agreement with a smile that wasn't pretty.

"
Why
?" Heather demanded of them. "Enlighten me on why this upsets you so."

"We've lived it," the woman scientist said. "His sister
might
just be arrested and never seen again. Her work mates and family would have no idea if she was alive, or tortured and buried. Or they might just inform her bosses she wasn't dependable. Once she was denounced she'd never have a legitimate job again. No agency would ever manage to finish the paper work if she applied for help, being jobless and homeless. She might find something to survive, day work off the books, picking vegetables or prostitution perhaps. She might suicide which still serves as a lesson to others. I still worry what I may have unleashed on my cousins in North America by defecting. If they could even
find
them."

"Why do you think we came here rather than go back to the Slum Ball?" the male said.

"They tried to blackmail me when I first came up," Mo said. "I thought you knew that story. Unless Jeff didn't want to explain the whole filthy thing to you in detail. Maybe not the same faction of the same government, but they all have a sameness about how they operate. I don't expect it to improve any time soon. I've heard there are still a few places that aren't so bad, Switzerland and a few other small European enclaves. Japan is the same as always if that's your thing, but it's still not welcoming to outsiders. Australia and some of the islands still seem civilized enough, but most of the Slum Ball has gone just as bad as China has been now for years and years." He thought about it, and added: "I don't know if Africa has
ever
been anything but a mess."

"We have Mr. King's body in custody," Heather finally admitted, feeling she would be deceptive to hide that from them. "Kurt Bowman killed him immediately after he threatened his sister. It's with regard to that killing I'm making a judgment today."

"Give him a medal," Mo said. "I'll design one if you haven't got around to such things yet."

Heather didn't address that suggestion.

"I've heard enough to render a decision," she announced, rattled at their vehemence a little. "Mr. Bowman, you have a choice. You can accept my justice, or if you fear facing it you may refuse it and face expulsion. Anyone who has rejected my justice is unwelcome at Central in the future. You may leave for anywhere you please, but I gather from your situation that North America is not somewhere you'd want to see again. Armstrong is under their law, and frankly there may be other issues with Armstrong in the near future. I'd be remiss if I didn't warn you, it may not be a safe haven even if you had no problems under North American law."

Kurt glanced at the witnesses, and none of them seemed surprised at her warning.

"You may leave if you choose," Heather allowed, "but
where
is none of my concern, beyond your heading there as quickly as commercial transport makes practical. If you leave for Home my understanding is you are unlikely to find accommodations, even temporary ones such as a hotel room, so you should plan on passing through Home with another habitat or Earth nation as a final destination.

"If you subject yourself to my judgment it will be enforced without delay. I may decide anything from letting you walk out the door without any censure at all, to public execution. I may impose conditions or just make suggestions. This is an issue of my sovereignty, so we shall consider it independently of your status over this homicide. What is your desire in this matter?" she asked sternly.

Kurt really wished Heather was more readable. Her face had been a mask of neutrality since looking at the video. If it was Dakota deciding he'd run, because she was horrified at the video. There was the favorable testimony on the one hand from the witnesses, that there was a credible threat. And he had limited funds and places he could reach. His job prospects anywhere he went were also uncertain, but he was wagering his
life
. He'd hate to play poker with this young woman, much less a game of bet-your-life.

The pistol laying close to hand on her table suggested she not only meant what she said, but might carry out a capital sentence right where he stood. Should he ask for mercy? Or would that just suggest he'd done something wrong for which he needed forgiveness?

"May I make a short statement before saying yes or no?" Kurt asked.

"Certainly," Heather agreed.

"I regret killing the man, as a practical thing. At the instant I acted I
felt
threatened. My chest was tight with terror. I'd just gone to a lot of trouble to get away from people like him. And then there he was, right in my face,
here
, where I felt safe.

"I have one more question. Have you ever been in my position? Have you ever killed someone and had to worry about being punished, or at least how people would regard you over it?" His eyes tellingly went to the pistol on the table.

"I haven't aimed at a man and pulled the trigger," Heather admitted. "But I've directed an artillery strike and told my gunner to fire. I've ordered missiles launched to kill a vessel and conduct bombardments. I take full responsibility for having said
fire,
the same as if I pressed the button."

That satisfied Kurt. "Then I will subject myself to your justice."

Heather gathered herself, but didn't hold him in suspense too long. "I declare your homicide self defense. One has a right to defend not only yourself, but family and country. It is considered honorable many places to defend a home in which you are shown hospitality. Therefore I thank you for removing an agent, a spy, from our midst."

Kurt let out a sigh he wasn't aware he was holding.

"That said...Your response was excessive, and not well thought out. However, I find its very excess proof of innocence. You did not
plan
this attack. It was obviously a visceral response. One should not push another into a corner without considering the possibility they have been pushed too far. Have you had any training in fighting or the martial arts?" Heather inquired.

"No Ma'am...uh, Heather. I haven't struck anyone since I bloodied a fellow's nose in elementary school. We both got a month off and assigned to alternate classes for that. I've never owned or fired a weapon either. Not even when I worked on Home. I stuck mostly to the workers cafeteria and recreation area and didn't socialize much with the Homies."

"There is no judgment or fine against you," Heather said. "We do not have any sort of dojo, even an informal one at Central. However you said you intend to go back to Home and I know they do have a group that meets. I strongly suggest you seek to join whatever group exists when you return and seek instruction. Such arts are always centered around self discipline. It may keep you from reacting badly another time, when there is no guarantee you will be found blameless."

"I'm quite willing to do that," Kurt promised.

"Neither can I shield you from all the consequences of your actions," Heather warned. "Some of the people who witnessed your attack are going to be afraid of you. I won't release the video to the public net. It's entirely too brutal for a public document. Some may decide not to socialize with you. They have freedom of association and what they do outside their job duties is their own business. There is even a remote possibility North America may target you if they find out what happened to their agent. Keep all those things in mind."

"What
are
you going to do with the agent?" Kurt asked. He couldn't bring himself to say
body
.

"My friends on Home have had a similar situation before, and all they got was abuse for the courtesy of returning the fellow. This one is simply going to disappear. If you don't mention him again, we won't either," Heather promised.

"No Ma'am. That works for me."

"We are concluded then," Heather said, not to them, but to Dakota. She dismissed them.

"You hurting very badly?" Mo asked.

"More an occasional twinge," Kurt assured him. "They have a nerve stimulator on it that senses when it hurts and injects a message to counter it. Sort of like wearing noise cancelling headphones. I just get a quick pin prick now and then, and it disappears almost as soon as I notice it."

"Can you drive?" Mo asked. "I mean, a manual control vehicle? I have a truck that needs to be driven to Armstrong and there's no reason it can't be done one handed. If you're alert. It runs most of the way on auto but you need to drive it to dock or wait in a queue if they are backed up. You aren't taking any drugs for the pain?"

"No, just some Naproxen. Nothing you wouldn't take on your own for a headache." Kurt was just glad he was all business, and wasn't interrogating him about the killing. Heather hadn't made the video
public
, but she'd shown Mo the rest of the video she'd started to show at the trial. He was the main supervisor to Kurt, so she figured he deserved a full report. Mo kept that to himself.

"I've never driven a truck though. Not even a pickup truck. I've driven several kinds of cars, if that's sufficient. I've never pulled a trailer behind a car either. I understand it can be hard to back them up."

"No problem," Mo assured him. "This is a straight truck, not articulated. It's a little wider than an Earth car, but you can see the edges and it has a back-up camera. It has a heads up screen to route you, and when you get there it will overlay where to park or wait."

"Do I need to get a license?" Kurt worried.

Mo gave him a remorseful look. "It's pretty simple to drive a vehicle on a road. I suppose if we start having too many accidents they might start a
private
driver certification process, like getting a pilot's ticket. But that's not a government license."

"Oh, sorry. Earth Think creeping in," Kurt said, and grimaced. "Where do I report?"

"I'll send the routing to your pad. Also, Security requests you run video on your spex the whole trip, door to door," Mo requested. "If you don't want it on your own set they'll give you a pair to wear."

"That's no problem. I have lots of open memory, and can download it to them when I get back. Do you know what they're looking for?" Kurt asked.

"I'm not sure
they
know what they're looking for," Mo said. "But there are signs they are militarizing Armstrong again. Anybody visiting is being asked to record their visit. Where they're getting enough people to analyze it all is another question I don't know. But it's not my problem as long as they aren't stealing my people to do it."

* * *

"They aren't going to
do
anything about it," Chen said. "I mean, the two organizations are not going to attack us. That's not to say some zealot might not act on his own. Nobody can predict that."

Jeff perked up and paid attention. It was completely out of character for Chen to speak in short absolute statements. He hedged and considered alternatives for everything. Jeff sometimes wondered how Chen could distrust any constant so thoroughly, and yet seem content and not consumed with anxiety. So he gave his bare statement a very high probability of accuracy. But he was still curious about
why
he thought that.

"That's good," Jeff said quickly, to show he wasn't doubting the man. "I'm most interested. How did you come to that conclusion?"

"Things are a mess again in North America. One faction has influence in one city, another faction has control in a different city. God's Warriors have much more of a base in the west and rural areas. They even have control of some urban areas in the south. The Sons of Liberty have a hold on the north, the east, and a few urban areas in the west. It doesn't matter where you go however.
All
the local media is ignoring Pensacola, just like the national news services. If they intended to make trouble for us there would be a huge propaganda program rolled out to paint us monsters where they have local control and can push a partisan message, but it's quiet everywhere. There would be lots of video of crying children with dirty faces, shots of damage, and sad stories of orphaned kids who by a miracle of chance were off at the zoo or something when their parents were blown up by the spacers. The Europeans are wringing their hands over it much worse than the USNA."

"All the economic disruption hasn't hurt local broadcasting?" Jeff asked.

"Far from it," Chen assured him. "They're selling really cheap radios and small broadcast TVs like crazy. People want something cheap to keep their kids occupied in the camps. All the camps have wireless access, but it's slow because the agency running the camp typically only has money to buy a pipe like a hotel would use for a hundred guests, and they have five thousand people trying to connect. There's no money to upgrade actual fiber trunks into new areas as the population moves. The adults all want access and there is no way to ration wireless. You can run out of food or water and it takes hours for them to get ugly, but let the crappy slow wireless go down and a camp becomes a mob in minutes.

The local schools can't run classes online serving thousands of new kids, each with his own device, like they've been accustomed to doing, and they are obligated to provide schooling. The FEMA people and the local schools both want to put the expense off on the other. So rather than pay for a decent pipe into the camp, the schools buy cheap air time and show the class on local TV. It isn't perfect. They broadcast off hours and expect people to record. Some do, some don't bother, but it meets their legal requirements. The cheap TVs don't have the memory to hold that many classes if people have say three kids, each in a different grade. So the people who care still end up making informal little grade classes around one TV in the camp. The kids text their work in and use a lot less bandwidth.

"But a lot of the refugees aren't in organized camps. They're in places they can't get decent net access for a phone, but they are close enough to a city to get broadcast. There are stations in areas where the migrants fled to in the south that had gone all online, and now they've rushed to bring their transmitters out of mothballs or buy from abroad. People want local news to help them with the unfamiliar area they're in now. If they are in Baton Rouge they want Baton Rouge news not New York.

"Local advertising is making the small stations profitable again. They may be in dire straits as a group, but the migrants are still a huge economic force, and local markets are aware of that. Some places the migrants make up half the population already. Lawyers are big advertisers and stores near camps run specials just for migrants. There are all kinds of services to represent them to local agencies for benefits, and permanent housing, private job agencies and services like searches to find missing children or relatives who left the family during their trip from up north. I'm figuring a lot of them are some kind of scam, but they're all
paid
advertising. Even the agency ads."

"Maybe this chaos will damage the Patriots so badly we'll have little trouble from them in the future," Jeff speculated. He seemed hopeful.

Chen looked at him concerned. "Jeff, sometimes you are...detached from social things. The Patriot Party pretty much destroyed themselves as an organization. They aren't coming back. At least not under that name. Most of them ended up Sons of Liberty. Right now there is kind of a reverse action in progress. Sons of Liberty are becoming smaller local parties, either city or county organization mostly. It's too dangerous a lot of places to be SOL with God's Warriors in the ascendancy.

"Now you have to ask yourself...Why don't they just bow to the inevitable and go over to God's Warriors? Wouldn't you?" Chen asked Jeff.

"Oh. It's really hard for me to think like that. I have a hard time imagining myself as either, so it's hard for me to put myself in their shoes and try to know what they would do," Jeff admitted.

"Yes, that's the point.
They
are so different they can't imagine switching over. They may look more alike than different to you. They both are strongly nationalist for North America, but aside from that they have very different core values. They don't agree at all what they want North America to
be
and to
do
. If they were sharply divided geographically maybe they'd break up into two countries. But they are diffused into each other's areas too deeply."

"What's going to happen then?" Jeff asked.

"That huge mass of people is going to keep right on feeling the same way they always have. They may be suppressed in expressing it. If they try to take on a new name and form a national party they may even be outlawed and kept from doing so legally. They can
call
themselves anything they want, and fracture into small local groups, but most of them are still going to hate spacers.

"After the War Between the States you couldn't legally be a Confederate, but that didn't mean they
thought
differently. They still had their own customs and hated Yankees for a hundred years. It takes generations to moderate, and that's even with a lot of easy movement between areas that came later.

"If it isn't actively suppressed there will be a new national party that embraces all the same ideas of the Patriot Party or the Sons of Liberty within a few years, a decade at the most I'd guess," Chen said. "The party, by whatever name, will form because there's a mass of people who all
think
that way."

"OK, I'm understanding it a little better," Jeff said. "They aren't going to suddenly
like
us no matter what happens internally. And at most we just have a few years before they may be able to reorganize again and express it more effectively."

"That's about the size of it," Chen agreed.

"Then we shall have to use the time wisely," Jeff decided, "to make sure it just doesn't matter if they hate us."

* * *

Captain Sass finished updating his file about the special equipment and personnel being accumulated at Armstrong. He was generating his twice a week report to his new superior, Colonel Norman, who was
not
the first among the Council of Colonels. Norman was the new replacement after the unfortunate assassination of Colonel Allister. Sass was just as glad to not work for the executive head. He'd come within a half minute of walking back in the room when Allister was shot.

He didn't take it as a demotion or miss being pinned on the bull's eye at all. His belated increase in service rank was also welcome. It put him on a par with the other Colonel's assistants. Allister had been a bit too believing of his own ideology about the unimportance of public rank versus party authority. As a captain he had to flip his collar and pull party rank a lot less. Unlike Allister, he had a life and a family to support. The increase in pay made a real difference to him.

Sass frowned. There was a list of freight and three new enlisted assigned, as well as a report on two civilians returned and their risk status, but nothing on any intelligence. They had two agents inserted and one was tasked with producing immediate assets within Central. He should have heard something about that by now. This document was produced by Corporal Schaefer. He would be an intelligence clerk, a glorified secretary, and he would just deal with logistics, not spooks, but this should be attached to a primary report about human intel from his superior. He looked at the chart and found the fellow over Schaefer, a Lieutenant Carlisle and got him on the screen. Once again his new rank saved him time and effort, not needing to prove party ranking. Things went so much smoother when everybody stayed in the same grade in
both
party and service.

"Carlisle, Sass here. I have your man's report on the build-up schedule at Armstrong. But nothing on your source development in Central. It was my understanding you had a man and two targets. We need some information on their internal structure and any awareness of our Armstrong activities. What is happening on that front?" Sass demanded.

"I haven't gotten my expected report from our agent. He was supposed to make his first recruitment a couple days ago. He makes a weekly report in code phrases to a handler who is his supposed sister, and that never happened. He has an alternative means of making an emergency report using a radio, either outside or from any port with a clear view of Earth. That hasn't happened either. He has never received a call from his purported sister, so we do not want to break routine this early if he's having some minor problem. He may have had his shift or work assignment changed, or even been required to travel. It's always something. I planned to allow him some more time to report before doing anything that might call attention to him."

"Well if he hasn't made his customary weekly call to this fictitious sister...wouldn't it be normal for a family member to wonder if he was OK? It seems to me you could have the agent with the correct com code and voice call and try to connect. No need to contact anyone else if he doesn't answer his own com." Sass suggested. He wasn't ready to
order
it quite yet. Intelligence had their own methods and held their resources jealously.

"Yes sir, I believe that can be done once with minimal risk," Carlisle agreed.

"Good, I'll be in the office late today. Com me if you get any information," Sass said.