April Read online

  APRIL

  by

  Mackey Chandler

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  The Last Part : Other Books and Links by Mackey Chandler

  Prologue

  September 12, 2083 – Mountain Home ASB, Idaho

  Colonel James Harris, USNA Aerospace Forces, watched the vendor's team fussing over the MNQR and checked the time again, anxiously. His commander liked to write orders that read like the one he was operating under today: "You will be prepared for a test, at 1400 Zulu." These civilians seemed to take that to mean, "It would be nice if you could..." They made him nervous with the cabinet still open, when less than seven minutes remained on the clock until the scheduled test run.

  The new and very highly classified device they were examining didn’t offer all that many possibilities for a catchy acronym, but they were making do with pronouncing it as Moniker. The Multiverse Neutrino Quantum Receiver. He understood it was at its heart a quantum computer. That was about all he understood. He wasn't an ignorant man or a technophobe, but when they tried to explain how it worked the whole idea sounded irrational to him.

  How it worked might be exotic, but anyone could understand what it was supposed to actually do. It was the same as radio, a way to transmit information, but with a different media. It detected a neutrino flux, with a sensitivity that was similar to how their conventional receivers detected ordinary electromagnetic radiation.

  Where before a neutrino detector required a huge tank of fluid buried deep underground and could barely sense a source of the elusive particles, this new device detected the sum of events in an unknown but vast number of parallel devices. That's where they lost him. When he had asked what the transmitter was like that produced those pulses, they had brusquely informed him he had no need to know, that was another group's concern.

  The unit they were testing was not an experimental set, but the first generation portable unit, that hopefully a military techie, a rating, could set up and use in field conditions. They had the first group of ratings observing today.

  After much discussion, a civilian technician latched down the cover on the equipment, much to Col. Harris' relief. Three large elevated screens let everyone in the room see what was happening. A clock in the corner of the center screen showed less than two minutes to the first scheduled transmission. People stopped moving about, grabbed seats and all the murmuring died away in anticipation.

  The counter in the corner of the screen reached zero and right on cue a series of spikes scrolled in the upper right corner of the screen. That raised a murmur of satisfaction among the technical crowd. The spikes changed from a constant series and started having gaps among them. The left screen started representing this variation as blocks of ones and zeros. The last display interpreted the timing of the pulses received, as spatial information. On a see through representation of the Earth, continents looking like they were embossed on a glass globe, a tetrahedron formed through the globe between the three detectors and the transmitter. Unless there was an island in that part of the Pacific he wasn't familiar with, they must have it on a ship. Today they were building on previous successful tests and trying to tweak the bandwidth a little wider.

  "We don't have any drop outs here," the chief researcher said over the open network. "All three receivers check against each other…What's that?" he interjected.

  On the crystalline representation of the globe, the three lines marking the cords between the receivers and the transmitter were flickering. When they faltered three new lines were drawn forming a pyramid with a new apex off the location in the Pacific and indeed, off the Earth’s surface slightly into near space.

  "What the hell?" the head honcho started and then it was as if his question itself triggered a response. The wave forms flowing so smoothly seconds before, dissolved in a meaningless hash on the screen and the data scroll ended.

  While the man stood, open mouthed, one of the rating, carefully kept back from the current activity, spoke up. "That's jamming. I've seen the same thing in satellite controlled UMVs, Run your gain way down and you might be able to localize it."

  Nobody replied to the lowly fellow, but several lab coated civilians got their heads together and started entering something manually on a keyboard. Some of the numbers on the screen started a slow scroll down and abruptly the globe reappeared. The data resumed with all ones imposed, but the directional lock was lost.

  "It's a 400 MHz buzz," the one technician reported without turning around. "Not nice clean pulses either but spikes, dirty spikes with quite a bit of variation, but no deliberate drop outs like we were inserting.”

  Recovering, their boss found his composure again. "See if you can get the receivers to compare variations and get a directional lock."

  The underlings played at it, selecting various length packets until they approached near a millisecond in length to reacquire and the three lines reappeared pointing to a spot in the sky. Further refining narrowed its location down to about twenty meters. They opened a smaller window scaled to show detail and watched, quietly arguing with each other and making hurried calls to the other receiver teams. "We can write a specific program for it later, to get a closer fix on the location – narrow it down off the recorded data too if we want," one fellow announced. The track on the screen was following an orbit, but it was wobbling like a badminton shuttlecock that was broken.

  "Jim, can you get your boys to check what is at that location we're tracking? Here's an address to tap into the running data," he offered, showing his pad.

  He spliced his office into the feed and listened intently to the quick reply from Space Command Tracking, before he turned to the waiting scientists.

  "The elements you are feeding them are a dead match for the habitat Mitsubishi 3," That produced a lot of indignation and several outright objections.

  On the screen, the strong emissions ended much more abruptly then they had started.

  "The Japanese? The Japanese can't even make the…uwff!" One of them got cut off by an associate's elbow before he could say too much.

  "I find it real hard to believe they have even a transmitter, much less a receiver," he told the one who cut him off, holding his ribs. Both of them glared at each other. "To speak of them being so far ahead they are designing powerful jamming devices is ridiculous."

  The lowly young soldier who had suggested it was a jammer spoke up. "Doesn't mean it was designed as a jammer," he pointed out. "My wife has an old hair dryer at home - no intent involved at all - but when she runs it – it jams the hell out of the TV."

  They looked at each other with new purpose and still no acknowledgment of his help.

  "So," one said slowly, "we need to define all the categories of devices that might generate such a signal, as an unintended consequence," he very tentatively proposed.

  "Don't worry o
n it too much son," Colonel Harris told him. "Mitsubishi 3 may sound Japanese, but it’s the American subsidiary of the company that built number three, so it's under USNA law. I'd say long before you can think-tank a list of what it could be, somebody will simply go take a look-see and we'll know exactly what's causing the fuss."

  Chapter 1

  Art checked the time again. It was 09:27, Sunday, Oct 3, 2083. He was finally past the three day hold he'd been ordered to endure and able to take his mission active. He was tired of wandering the boring corridors or eating in the cafeteria, watching these irritating people, unable to say anything to them about their antisocial acts. Patience wasn't something that came easily to him.

  He'd suspected two of the other passengers in his shuttle flight as likely fellow agents, but no one had contacted him and he'd seen neither of them these three days.

  He stepped out of the elevator with careful little steps, taking the measure of the acceleration on this deck. The clumsiness he experienced changing weight every time he stepped out on a new level, was starting to wear him down, because it seemed beyond his ability to acclimate to it. It was doubly irritating because he'd done so well in zero G.

  The attitude of people was wearing him down too. At home he was used to civilians being afraid of him in uniform, especially when they saw the gray shoulder patch, that said he was on interservice loan to Homeland Security.

  This corridor was at a nominal half G, the lowest used for habitation and he picked up speed warily, as he turned with spin and headed for the elevator down to the next deck, which would be about 70% G.

  He'd circled all around his target's apartment, making sure he had a clear mental picture of what surrounded it in three dimensions, not trusting the blueprints he'd studied to be current. The Singh kid wasn't home. He'd made sure he was starting breakfast at the cafeteria, then he'd quickly ended his own breakfast and left. The boy had stayed away from the apartment, returning late every day so far.

  If only the father had taken his son when he went off station, it would have made his mission much easier. The boy was sixteen, still a minor, so it was illegal abuse under USNA law to leave him at home alone, but Singh hadn't boarded him out, or hired a sitter while he was gone. As far as he could tell reading the directory, there wasn't any care facility for teens on the habitat and no commercial sitting services. They seemed to just ignore quite a few laws, that were taken for granted below. It had shocked him at first and he didn't understand why his briefing hadn't spelled out how different it was on the hab. It was like a different country.

  The schedule for the nanoelectronics conference the father was attending at ISSII said he'd be gone over a week. Art's superiors somehow knew the man would be staying on after it ended too. A number of sentences started but not finished and significant looks between his superiors, convinced him there were a lot of details they hadn't felt it necessary to share with him.

  The father's workplace was definitely off limits. He had stretched his orders yesterday and done a light surveillance of the Lucent Lab where Singh worked, as part of his 'acclimation'. Their security was as tight as the rest of the station was lax. Not only electronic, but armed guards at a single choke point entry. There was no way was he getting in there, without a court order to open up in his hand.

  Art was going as fast as he felt safe to shuffle along, touching the wall tentatively and was slowing down to turn the corner, when he heard a colophony of shrill voices and the rapid scuff of little feet overtaking him. He stopped short of the corner, his back to the wall and waited to see what was passing him.

  Four local children went by with a floating gait, graceful as antelope in slow motion. Chattering over each other in a strange slang, so fast and loud that he couldn't figure out what any one of them was saying. They all looked to be eight to ten years old and dressed bizarrely. Not a one of them would have made it through a security gate at a school or mall in North America looking like that, without being turned away, or held and their parents called. Not that they were technically illegal, but Neighborhood Defenders considered community standards too, not just the letter of the law and eccentric appearance was disruptive. That they might have their own community standards, was something beyond Art's rigid world view.

  All of them were shamelessly bare legged, in shorts with sticky footies. They all had expensive spex on, even though they were little kids. Letting kids wear expensive stuff in public was just begging for them to be robbed or worse. At least it was down below. Only one of them had gloves on, while they were out touching every grubby call button and take hold in the public areas as if they were safe in their own homes. There was not a mask, knee pad, elbow pad, or head protection of any sort to be seen on any of them, while they were out running wild in the public corridor.

  Not only were they completely unescorted by an adult and half naked for any perv or terrorist out prowling around to snatch, but the one in the lead didn't have any sort of shirt on at all. The reason for that was obviously to show off the colorful dragon drawn curled across his belly, under his left arm, up the back and looped over the shoulder, with its snarling head staring at him with boggled eyes and open jaws.

  When they passed the one in front with the dragon spun around in mid leap to take a look back at him, his face was very Oriental, with strong epicanthal folds on the eyelids. The motion threw out long braided pigtails, startling Art. A bare breasted boy was bad enough, but surely they wouldn't let a little girl go out in public with no top on! Unless they allowed long braided hair on a boy…He couldn't decide which would be worse. The thought was so shocking he gasped at the audacity of it, either was indecent and the tattoo! That was beyond the pall.

  He certainly hoped that was a fake. He couldn't imagine a child having a real tattoo. At least he hoped it was just body markers and would fade out in a week or so. Earthside you might let your boys swim topless if you had your own very private pool some folks would mind their own business if they found out. But if you tried that in public, even if they were escorted, Family Services would have them in custody in a heartbeat for endangerment and you'd be on trial for neglect. Lately, public sentiment was such, that even short sleeved shirts were frowned on in really conservative areas. Some restaurants would refuse you service in shorts or short sleeves, adult or child.

  The middle children ignored him in passing, but the last child in line seeing the front runner look back kicked off the deck like a ballerina en Pointe, making a lazy turn in the half G, examining Art with the tactless stare children use. It was hard to tell, but this one also appeared to be a girl, although the hair was shorter and she was strikingly Caucasian with corn silk blond hair and bright blue eyes.

  She threw her arms out to slow her spin enough, to look Art over better. On her forehead, the shiny cabochon of a Public Eye lens on a headband looked him over too. That was not-something-he-wanted, to be on a video archive somewhere. Maybe her folks made her wear it for her protection, even if they were crazy enough to let her out of the house alone. In that was the case, he could hope the vid would scroll off private storage in a few days.

  She pulled her arms in to spin faster, landing just in time to join hands with her friend to the front, as the lead kid grabbed a take hold bar, swinging the whole line of his friends around the corner. The arched line of them swung around the corner in a crack the whip maneuver that Art would not have believed possible if he hadn't seen it. The end girl curled up and hung on double handed against the snap, by stretching back out to ease it. So comfortable with the gymnastics that she took time to look over her shoulder at him, like he was the strange one here. Somewhere on the other side of the corner, she must have found a take hold, then the line disappeared from his view the same way – swapping ends.

  By the time he eased around the intersection they were gone from sight and just their voices echoed down the empty corridor. They looked like a bunch of savages, he thought. Even the kids in the Arabic Protectorate weren't as bold when he'd done patro
l there. These kids looked at you without a trace of fear on their faces. He found that really offensive.

  Down a level on the elevator and along the corridor at a new rhythm brought him to his target's door. Not only was there not a visible camera on the residence hallways, there was no real security system on the door either, just a taste and code lock. It never occurred to him that cameras were deliberately visible, only for the intimidation factor.

  Naval Intelligence had used a government inserted back door to get him the entry codes off the habitat's computers. He could have cracked such an easy entry himself, but he had learned early to not display too many skills, or his instructors asked where he had acquired them. His small hobby of burglary as a teenager had never been discovered, or he'd have never been accepted into the service for anything but scut duty.

  The same caution, had kept him from asking the experienced fellows about the prospects of liberating souvenirs on missions. All he needed was one self righteous straight arrow blabbing, to ruin the game he had planned.

  Art pulled his pad off his belt and ran it around the hatch edges checking for hidden security systems, with his military plug-ins. If he somehow alerted the station security, he had a set of get out of jail free documents in his pouch. That wouldn't be the way to impress his superiors on his first solo though, to need bailed out. His briefing had emphasized – if you can't achieve your objectives, withdraw without making our activities known. In other words - don't screw up. If they wanted to draw public attention to the investigation, they'd just walk in with warrants, not send in an operative.

  He pushed the call button, just to be sure there was nobody inside. If it was linked to somebody's phone he'd ask for the wrong name. After a pause he punched the stolen numerical code in and the door opened without a hitch. He stepped through into the dark, closing the door and pulled a small light out. There didn't seem to be any manual light switch near the door, so he took another chance and said aloud, "Lights up." They came on full without any alarm, even at a strange voice, so he was encouraged. Even in a walled and gated community Earthside, this place would have never lasted a week without being robbed by somebody, maybe a grade school kid. It was hard to believe that anything of value could be in such an insecure place.