Welcome Aboard Air Marineris
Chapter Eleven: Preparing the First Stage

It took three days to get the first beams from the ingots we had in stock. The metal was part of our regular stock in trade. We exported iron and metals to the Moon and LEO because we could make them cheaper. Since we had a non-reducing anhydrous atmosphere functionally as good as space, our metals’ purity was second to none, and we had plenty of carbon to make it ductile. We didn’t need steel for our Quonset huts. Iron was just as good, even allowing some extra bulk for the occasional rock fall down the cliffs.

If you are using automated equipment on a twenty-four/seven schedule, you can get things done quickly. We didn’t need to have any slow and fragile humans who required care and feeding. Once the beams were coming off our little rolling mill, we could put them on the forming machine to make our arches. When we got them to Lowell along with our roof panels, we could set them on the foundation that we had started to lay out with our single prospector on site. It didn’t need to be too elaborate. Mars has been quiescent for billions of years. Quonset huts go up fast if you have the components.

I had to do my first report to my ‘supervisor’ at Starward. We hadn’t gotten our miracle radio in from Earth yet, but Klara recommended that I put an initial report in, at least. Later, we could figure out how to make sure we spent more time working than reporting. I completed a brief exposition of our operational plans, including the steps we were taking to begin construction. I didn’t stress the hustle I had tried to instill in my colleagues. They were left to presume I was approaching the project with the measured pace of a civil servant in any large and unwieldy bureaucracy. I also overlooked the method of towing our first airship, and the fanpage we were starting. It wasn’t relevant. The bare text version without elaboration was sufficient for my first effort. It established a laconic style I would follow whenever I made my occasional reports. I certainly wasn’t going to make it a teenage diary.

It was five days since Bee had gone away, and he was halfway to the Moon. He sent me a cheerful missive keeping me up to date, while creating a precedent for frequent but not continuous communication. Of course, Linh was watching his monitor. We didn’t need to push that into anyone’s face. We would hear his every word, delayed by the distance, but that wouldn’t necessarily tell us what he was thinking.

’Dear Sis: It’s amazing how much you can enjoy a journey if you’re not in constant fear of your life. Lovely food, and I am in the crew’s quarters. The rest of the ship has been converted to shift cargo. It’s quite restricted when there is no passenger area. Where I sat is filled up with pineapples, our newest craze. Bags of coffee and spices make up most of the rest. The bulk cargo is outside in nets giving us even more shielding.

‘I have had lots of time to talk with Captain Sagan. She is very apologetic about our early meetings when she ignored the peril to my life. She was instructed to save me only later. I assured her that I didn’t take it personally. She was acting under orders. It didn’t seem to help when I admitted I would have done the same thing. I said that if I were instructed to stand by impassively as she was slaughtered, I would feel just as guilty as she did. Isn’t that kind? True, she knew nothing but what they told her about me as I came aboard. I did not give a very good impression of myself when I did appear on her ship. Maybe she thought she was justified, but I would not have done the same thing. You know what a fool I am. We will be doing our mid-course rotation soon. If we didn’t at this speed, we would make quite a mess on the Moon, or go so quickly past it that it would take us days to return. Dear sister, I wish you could be here to see what I am seeing. I know that is impossible, but I wish it anyway. Love. Your brother, Boris.’

Bee wasn’t worried about the journey to the Moon. That has been traversed practically every week for years and they haven’t had an accident yet. He has a way of tearing at me. He was trying to keep it light, but he was reminding me that something could go wrong. If it did, he wished he could see me one last time. He knew that no real danger was to be admitted. There was that, then, no question. Something had set Starward off, and he knew it too, without being told what was happening here. They were watching us.

I would imagine, as he had implied in his message, that in all his conversation with a guilt-softened Sagan, he would have found out something about what was happening in EarthSpace. That would need to wait for Linh’s analysis, along with the debriefing we would get from Bee on his return. It would be unlikely, with all the travelling she would be doing, that she had not chanced upon some information about the curious developments that are apparent even from the end of the line where we are.

Linh is no astrophysicist, any more than I am a chemist, but we are both qualified technologists, and we can tell science from magic. What we expected to see when the radio arrived was a kind of magic. It might work, but it would not be science as we know it. I decided it was time for another conversation with Klara, so I called her and set up a face to face for the next day. She called back right away and suggested the cafeteria again. It seemed obvious that she did not prefer to meet in her office anymore. I agreed with her. Some things are better discussed elsewhere.

We met in the same place in the cafeteria. The table in front of the Rose and Brier was open. It seemed appropriate to meet there. She was sitting there in front of that somber background. She didn’t greet me with one of her curt, formulaic smiles when I sat down. She did not appear to be at all content. The positive element was that, as usual, she appeared to be entirely collected. The armor was on, and I couldn’t see any chinks. The hair, the blouse, the minimal makeface, the scent: all were normal for her. She was ready for whatever it was that she had planned to unleash. And one further thing that would have alerted me if there had been nothing else. She was wearing a disposable surgical mask, and she carried another for me.

“Put this on, Mo. The story from Dr. Syd is that he thinks I might have something communicable. Very dangerous in this closed environment. You must wear a mask for that. Protection, he says.”

I put it on, and she sang another song.

“It is more difficult to overhear if you are visually and vocally masked. And there’s no need to tell you why we aren’t meeting in my office. I’m sure the same thing has occurred to you as has occurred to me. This radio they are offering us is not the first one on Mars. There’s been another one here for some time. I have been living in a fool’s paradise, Mo. It never occurred to me they would be spying on us. With the evidence I have now, I think it should have occurred to me earlier. Why would they be asking for simultaneous reports if they had nothing to compare them to?”

“Well, meeting outside your palatial office must mean something the second time. I thought it was odd the first time too. You usually go out and bring something back. And I wondered why they should pay me the big buck and hobble me with pointless reports right away. They can always fire me for the crime of living while female anyway. Why not let me get going, at least, first? And why are they so suspicious of us? We never even conceived of depriving them of what is theirs. What we want is good for them too.”

“Come on, Mo. You’ve worked for big money people all your life. Have you ever met one who isn’t convinced that you want what’s theirs? After all, they want what’s yours. Their money isolates them. We are building something here which will have great and enduring value. If they are not selfless, how can they believe we are? History is very convincing. Every independence movement in history has stolen the property of the rulers they have thrown off. Why should we be different? They have significant disadvantages that make them weak, and those very same conditions make us disproportionately strong. We are above the gravity well, and all their strength is constrained. How can they help but be afraid for their things? When did fear make for considered judgement?”

“Then, what hope do we have? Is there no way to work with them? I don’t want to fight. I want to build a railroad. I am sorry for them; I don’t envy them. They can keep it. I have what I do, and they only have what they have. And what you say makes me more afraid for Boris. Why did we send that old man into that, Klara? He was safer here.”

“Because we need to know what they know, Mo. We need to know that to avoid fighting them. It would be a terrible waste to get into a scrap with them. After all the trouble we’ve been through, that would be an obscenity. I would never do that by choice. We might, however, need to convince them that there is no point in that against our cabal of witches. This is a battle we could not easily lose. But it is much better not to fight at all. You agreed that old man is the best person we have. He knows people. The fact that he is old and a bit feeble will protect him. Weakness is sometimes strength. And, in our world, it needs to be a man. You know why. It’s not reasonable, but it is true.

“As we speak, Linh is combing my office. If she confirms a bug, we will leave it in place. We can use such a resource and manage it. There may not be one. But I would be surprised if there weren’t. Something has excited their suspicions. We did say a few things that could be conflated into a conspiracy by a suspicious mind. It doesn’t take much if you are half convinced already.

“We must have a spy here. It would take someone to operate it. And someone to augment our unambitious statements with something that person knows they want to hear. Linh tells me there could be at least two types of neutrino radios. One of them could be small enough to conceal. The two are the sending type and the full on send/receive type. Such a radio would be completely undetectable by standard radio equipment. The send-only kind is just a riff on a standard radio, but the send/receive is something else entirely and could use those entangled neutrinos. As far as we know, both are impossible with present technology.”

“If your office is bugged, why couldn’t mine be too? There’s no security here, really. Why would we need it? Two hundred million miles gives you a bit of room to be sloppy. And why would we suspect them? We think we are secure within our cache run by Linh. But she couldn’t know if they are running one of those radios. I hate this! It’s one of the reasons I left Earth. I’m going to need to censor myself now and be worried that people I don’t know are going to misunderstand me. What a stupid way to run things. Why can’t they just let me work?”

“Don’t worry, Mo. You just do your job and let me run interference. I won’t burden you with what Linh tells me, but we will take what measures are called for.”

I was facing her. We were sitting on opposite sides of the table. She had sat herself so I would sit facing the Valles. That was supposed to comfort me, and it did. But on my left was the residue of the explosion that was the reason for the Rose and Brier. It was a chilling reminder of how far people would go. One move tempered the other, but she was trying. I wouldn’t deny that.

Besides being my boss, she was a wonderful friend. No pushover, mind you, but a friend to count on. It seemed to me that I was going to need a protectress. It was just a premonition, though. I still hadn’t experienced the dubious pleasure of meeting the Professor Doctor.