Chapter 18 misdirecting paranoia
Now the entire team was busy tearing through the fleet of cars which belonged to the facility. There was a car lift in the garage, to do vital repairs, but it would only take one car at a time and there were eight of them.
And I only had to say, “Wasn’t one of the cars used to take someone injured in an accident to hospital?” and they were all over the back seats as well, pulling them apart.
I figured I had about four hours today and as many tomorrow; there was a definite day and night, and the night staff were relatively skeletal. After all, they were watching for whistleblowers and treachery from the inside, not infiltration from the outside.
I went to see Plunkett.
“What on earth is going on?” he barked.
“I ran a drill,” I said. “The team uncovered some weaknesses in the system. It’s enough to claim the possibility of sabotage.”
“Oh, very clever,” he said. “Making them acknowledge it was possible was a master stroke.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I was quite pleased with the concept.”
“Fine,” he said. “Take a car into headquarters, and report it.” He wrote me a chit. I smiled, and nodded, and left.
You are thinking, but he’s still alive.
Patience.
You’ll never make a successful sanction without patience.
I jacked back into the system. My 3-D printer printed off the little drone I needed, to carry a canister of cooking gas through the ventilation shafts to Plunkett’s office. It’s still the quickest way of making a build-up of carbon monoxide.
I locked Plunkett’s door, and the door into his quarters through the security system. We could use Willow’s back door to unlock the doors in our own good time. I lit the gas canister with the use of the drone; a small piece of sodium and a drop of water as the canister turned on. I shut the ventilator behind my little death trap, and as I surmised, lost control of the drone in so doing. I did not need it any more. The gas was burning away, using up the oxygen in Plunkett’s office, which was only barely bigger than my cupboard-sized office.
The beauty of carbon monoxide poisoning is that the changes to his life signs would be slow. He would apparently just doze off; and who has not done that.
Besides, I wanted to get the medical monitors a bit distracted too.
I swept into their domain.
“We uncovered a possible weakness in the cyber systems,” I said. “Now, it’s not impossible that there was inside help; if anyone shows an elevated heart rate, log it for me, in case it is someone in fear of discovery.” I hesitated. “You will have noticed the interest in the car pool; we believe a repeater may have been brought in. I hesitate to point a finger at any of the drivers, but their pay is not great, and most men can be tempted with a high enough bribe, however patriotic, if made to believe it’s in the country’s interests.”
They nodded, wisely.
General security was in the hands of the soldiery, who included the drivers.
I summoned the captain of the guard and his lieutenants to my office.
“You know why I’m here,” I said. “I’ll be blunt. There has been sabotage to the internal cyber system. I can’t be certain whether it was effected by any of the cybersec team or the scientists at work. I am still not certain whether it is whistle-blowing over the unexpected slowness of the team, or whether it was done for mercenary purposes to sell the project out. I suspect the latter. Tell your men to trust nobody with the scientific knowledge to make a breach in security. The cybersec team are looking for uplinks on the cars as a relay, but if there’s a traitor within them… I want them and the scientists put under discreet surveillance.”
My last visit was to Doctor Sullivan, who was in charge of the project.
“Doctor, I don’t want to point fingers, but I assume you know, and can vouch for your team,” I said.
“Of course my team’s integrity is impeccable!” he yapped, immediately.
He looked a bit like a Pekinese dog, as it happened; big spectacles enhancing the size of his eyes to increase the illusion made by rather straggly hair at the side of his head, a sad sort of moustache with ends that tried to lift and gave up in despair, and a snub nose.
I had to look twice to make sure he was not an uplifted dog; which he was not, just an unfortunate accumulation of features.
“Indeed,” I said, soothingly. “However, someone has been attempting sabotage; I need you and your team to be alert, and watching out for suspicious behaviour.”
I could fairly well guarantee that, with everyone watching each other, they would not be watching me.
It would be hilarious to watch if only I had not wanted to get out fairly soon.
I went to the front entrance.
“I have an errand to run for the general,” I said, showing my chit to the guards.
“Your staff are looking over all the cars,” said the guard on duty.
“What, haven’t they completed the search on even one?” I asked.
“If they finish before the project closes I’ll be surprised,” he said, gloomily. “The backbiting, accusations, and re-searching already searched places has to be seen to be believed.”
“Dear me,” I said. “I must get to headquarters. What about a motorbike?”
“There’s a couple, the outriders use them when the General goes into headquarters,” he said.
I borrowed a helmet, and a duster, and rode out of the cavern. I did not ride into headquarters, I drove off into the hills, where Willow met me.
We hid the bike, and settled down to watch the ensuing mayhem I had set up behind me, with every disparate group mistrusting pretty much everyone else. If I had let loose a group of small boys playing cops and robbers, I don’t think there would have been less confusion.
“Quid custodiet Ipsos custodes,” said Willow, sniggering. Who watches the watchers indeed! It would only have been funnier if I had provided them all with magnifying glasses and deerstalker hats. Doctor Sullivan was sneaking around on tiptoes, peering suspiciously at any soldier he saw, and the soldiers were noting his suspicious behaviour, and were following him with heavy-footed caution. More soldiers were watching the cybersecs, who were suspicious of such close scrutiny as well as tending to be a little over-tightly strung, as cybersecs are, and several cases of fisticuffs broke out.
This led to enhanced heart rates, as did the general mayhem, which the health checkers were busy monitoring, without even noticing how slow Plunkett’s heart rate was becoming because they were looking for enhanced heart rates. Not depressed ones.
The room was small; I reckoned he had taken a lethal dose before I even left the facility.
Willow unlocked his doors, so nobody knew he had been locked in, but I wanted to wait until he flatlined before I opened the vent.
It would not be immediately obvious why he died; they talk about the cherry-red appearance of a carbon monoxide death, but honestly? It’s not that pronounced, and for someone with high colour like Plunkett, it would not show as much.
And once he flatlined, and Willow restored everything to normal and wiped all records of anything happening, we drove away. I shed the uniform, and Damian’s appearance, and we checked in at a motel as a honeymooning couple.
Naturally, Willow wanted to get back to Quin, but at least he was old enough now to be left for a few days.
And we vanished back to Seattle.
I waited for a pat on the back from Tarquin, and news that we could relax.
“Rick! Nice work,” said Tarquin. “We were able to sign it off as heart failure due to pressure.”
“Good,” I said. “Now can I go on holiday?”
“Sorry, Rick,” said Tarquin. “Plunkett has a son.”
“How most inconvenient of him,” I said. “Serving overseas, I suppose?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Tarquin. “He’s on the moon; commandant of the prison battalion there, mining Helium three.”
This was an essential element for cold fusion; what was new in the research station was getting cold fusion without a plant the size of a small town.
“You have to be kidding,” I said.
“But, Rick! You have a friend, called Jim, who has a secret British space plane,” said Tarquin.
The hell!
Of course Tarquin would know that.
“How much?” I asked.
“You don’t feel happy to do your patriotic duty?” asked Tarquin.
“The hell I do!” I snarled. “And I’ll have to pay Jim. He doesn’t operate for love and cookies.”
He named a sum.
It was a serious amount of spondulix.
I stared at him.
He sighed, and doubled it.
I wasn’t going to complain.
“I need blueprints of the entire complex,” I sighed. “And the top grade of pressure suit for rugged conditions.”
“You will have them,” said Tarquin.
I knew a bit, in theory, about the operations on the moon.
Willow gave me an old-fashioned look.
“Rick, you’ve never been on the moon, have you?” she asked.
“No,” I confessed.
“Then you’ll have to pay Jim to teach you how to survive it,” she said. “This ain’t like dusting crops, boy, and it isn’t like Devil’s Canyon back home.”
We love that old 2D film, but I knew she was serious if she was quoting from it.
“I’ll get Jim to teach me,” I said, obediently.
Willow’s smile was worth more than if she had patted me on the head and fed me a treat.
“Tell me about what you know,” she said. “I know there’s a base and a prison, and that’s about it.”
“The base is in Shackleton Crater,” I said. “It’s on the Lunar south pole, and the base is in eternal shadow, and the edge in eternal light.”
“Ah, so thermocouples for power,” said Willow, catching on right away.
“Exactly,” I said. I explained for the benefit of the kids, “A thermocouple produces electricity if one end is in a radically different temperature to the other, and of course eternal darkness in zero atmosphere is around minus two hundred and seventy Fahrenheit, and permanently in sunshine is approaching two hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit. And it’s only out of sunshine during a lunar eclipse. And the higher the temperature differential, the more electricity it makes.”
“Isn’t there water at the poles?” asked Ruth.
“Yes, and another reason to build the base there,” I said. “It’s easy to get to. Meantime, the mine, which is hundreds of miles away, on one of the Marea, is a strip-mine, using massive machines to strip it, which are driven from inside the facility housing them by riggers, who are not prisoners and who earn a small fortune. Most of them go out on a five year contract, and can then retire.”
“Why isn’t it absolute zero in the crater?” asked Hammond.
“Because heat permeates the moon and seeps through the rocks,” I said. “Even Pluto isn’t absolute zero.”
He nodded, satisfied.
“And where does this special helium come from?” asked Ruth.
“The regolith,” I said. “You can’t call it ‘soil’ as there’s nothing organic in it. The machine has a variety of processes to separate out the helium, oxygen, which is also sent to the base, and other minerals, like titanium, which the moon is rich in, aluminium, and a whole host of stuff. It spits out the remainder, mostly silicon.”
“If the machines do all that, what do the prisoners do?” asked Marie.
“Walk ahead of the machines to move any large rocks, and spend a heap of time unclogging the machinery and cleaning off the lunar dust, which is like ground volcanic glass – dangerous work, as it can cut space suits if you are careless.”
“Don’t be careless, Rick,” said Ruth.
“I wasn’t planning to do so,” I said. “I was considering going as a rigger, but I think I’d rather be in the wind.”
“I think that’s only the solar wind,” said Hammond.
He was right.
“Well, that’s where the Helium 3 comes from,” I said. “It’s been blown onto the moon by the solar wind.”
I called Jim, and told him I would need to get onto, and off the moon.
“Rick, are you suit-qualified?” he asked.
“I’ve done some basic suit training,” I said, evasively.
He sighed.
“And have you ever moved on the moon? Do you know how to ‘bunny-hop’ properly?” he asked.
“No, and that’s why I’m also paying you to make me moon-capable,” I said.
He sighed.
“The short course, I suppose?”
“I can probably afford three weeks intensive training?” I said.
“Oscar won’t like that,” said Jim. “He dislikes being on the moon for extended periods.”
“Perhaps he’d like to stay with Puss, Orville, and Amy,” I said. “Meet a few other uplifted cats.”
Jim considered.
“All right,” he agreed. “A bit of a holiday for him.”
Jim landed in the Arena again; and Oscar stalked out and jumped into Willow’s arms.
“Have fun, Oscar,” I said.
“Theank ‘ew,” he said.
“I hope he reads the same sort of books Amy and Orville like,” I said.
“Your cats read books?” Jim was taken aback. “Oscar understands technical manuals.”
“Orville likes cowboy stories,” I said.
“Well, I’m damned. I expect he’ll be demanding a tablet and a library,” said Jim. “Strap in. We’re going somewhere quiet on earth until I’m convinced you are safe in a suit, and then we’ll go somewhere quiet on the moon until I think you’re not too much of a liability.”
I’ve said similar things to people I’ve trained in survival before, so I shut up, and took it. Jim, after all, is the expert.
“I’ve checked the solar weather; we should have a month clear,” said Jim.
“Weather?” I asked, faintly.
He gave me a superior smirk.
“A big solar flare would spoil your day real quick,” he said. “Radiation, being hit by charged particles, which play merry hell even with hardened electronics, and so on. Now tell me why you’re going to the moon.”
I sighed.
“The last remaining member of a huge conspiracy to infiltrate government,” I said.
“Sounds hinky,” said Jim.
“It goes past hinky into brainwashing and training their own children, and trafficking others to experiment on,” I said. “The prison governor is the last adult left standing.”
Jim whistled.
“You’re a loony,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to help.”
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