Hannah Sawyer (Kinsella Universe Book 3) Read online

  When they were down, the pilot came back to the passenger cabin. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sawyer, but the police are inspecting each vehicle. We have to wait for them to get to us. We’re not allowed to so much as crack the hatch.”

  Her father grunted, causing Hannah to look at him cautiously, her eyes on the floor. She was expecting something awful to happen to the pilot -- instead her father just nodded.

  “Tell the inspector that I would appreciate any help.”

  The pilot shook his head. “Not today, sir. It’s a very bad situation.”

  Her father looked at the pilot like a bird contemplating a worm, early in the morning. “What have you heard?”

  “Sir, not very much. That they are serious. There’s a Fleet frigate coming in from the Belt, out of Fleet World, with some very bad news.” He held her father’s eye for a second. “There’s only one kind of news this could be, sir.”

  “Indeed. Thank you,” her father’s words seemed to say that the matter was of no consequence.

  He turned to Hannah. “When we’re cleared, take a cab and go to Mojave. Tell Vladimir that for the time being you’re to work for him.”

  Hannah brought up a mental map of California. She was in Ontario; Mojave was across the mountains to the north. Take a cab? It was more than a hundred miles. Cabs had never been cheap and still weren’t.

  “Yes, sir.” If nothing else, she knew what her father wanted to hear.

  A few minutes later the pilot told them an important broadcast was coming up.

  Hannah and her father watched President of the Federation, Emil Van de Veer, explain the news. Fleet World had been attacked, but had driven off the attack. The attackers were thought to be alien. Then came the stark, hard, really bad news. “Fleet World was alerted by a ship that escaped from Gandalf. Gandalf was destroyed by nuclear bombardment from orbit; it is feared other colonies in the region may have been attacked as well.”

  The Federation had become too large to easily keep track of all the inhabited planets; Hannah knew there were about two hundred million people on Fleet World, but she didn’t know anything at all about Gandalf.

  There was a long wait to be inspected. Afterward, her father simply vanished to take care of his business. Hannah gathered up her two suitcases and headed for the taxis.

  The cab line was a zoo; there was no other word to describe it. A feeding frenzy in the hyena cage, Hannah thought. Hundreds of people were in a crowd, yelling and shouting at cabbies, threatening them, cajoling them, offering enormous sums of money to be taken to LA.

  A cab pulled up at the end of the line with a scream of hard-used turbines. A short, corpulent, red-haired man got out and stood for a second looking at the mass confusion. He was rotund, but his face was hard, his green eyes harder.

  “Shut up!” His voice didn’t need a bullhorn or amplification; it was loud enough, Hannah thought, to be heard halfway to LA.

  “I’m Gavin MacLeod!” the man shouted, “Teamster rep for Teamster’s Local 249!”

  There was a shouted chorus of suggestions about where he should go. Most awful; not a few violent.

  MacLeod simply ignored them. “All of you! You listen to me! Either shut up and stand still, or I call a strike! Everybody at the airport these days is a Teamster or one of our brothers! If I call a strike there will be no cabs, no baggage handlers, no clerks at the counters, no trains, planes or limos. Shut up!”

  Hannah was mildly amazed; her father could take charisma lessons from Gavin MacLeod. With nothing but his loud voice, the threat of a strike and his charisma -- in a minute, the crowd was standing silent.

  “No one moves, unless I say so. Now, who here wants to go to LA?”

  About half the people raised their hands.

  The labor boss pointed to a large building about a kilometer away. “That’s the Metro Rail terminal. Go there. No cabs to LA, today. Or anywhere between here and there.”

  There was an immediate storm of protest. The union man simply shook his head. “Sorry folks, there are extra trains put on. It’s the fastest way to town.”

  He turned to the drivers, now drawn up in a loose crowd. “You need to think quick. Today is your lucky day, if you want to make some money. Long hauls, all you want! So, those of you who don’t want to make money, who want just local runs, stand away the cab rank for now.”

  About a third of the cabbies shifted away from the cabs.

  “Okay, now,” MacLeod pointed at the closest person still waiting for a cab. “Where do you want to go?”

  “Riverside,” the man answered.

  “Okay, Riverside. Anyone else going to Riverside?” There was quite a show of hands, and MacLeod simply pointed to the next three closest to the front, then to one of the cabbies standing close by him. How he picked which cabbie was a mystery to Hannah, but for the next few minutes people were being rapidly and efficiently dispatched.

  About half of the people ahead of her had been dealt with when a young man said, “Boron,” was his destination.

  “Boron, anyone else going to Boron?”

  There were no hands. “Barstow?” MacLeod asked.

  A single hand went up, an older woman.

  Hannah raised her hand.

  “Barstow?” Gavin asked her.

  “Mojave,” Hannah answered.

  MacLeod looked around. “Mojave works. Anyone else?” No one else raised their hands. “Tehachapi?”

  There were two people going to Tehachapi together and were waved off. The next thing Hannah knew, she was in a cab leaving the airport.

  The older woman had looked at Hannah, sniffed her disapproval of someone standing in the June California sun wearing a ski jacket and got into the front seat. Hannah got into the back with the man going to Boron. He was in his late twenties, tanned and ruggedly fit.

  “Josh Kline,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m a process engineer at a plant near Boron.”

  “Hannah Sawyer,” she replied.

  “A student?” he asked.

  “I just graduated. We were on vacation.”

  He brushed the sleeve of her anorak; there had been no easy way to get it into her suitcase. Unzipped and open, it wasn’t bad, even if the temperature outside had been in the low 40’s. Quite a bit different from Christchurch where it had been below zero.

  “Ski vacation in New Zealand,” Hannah confirmed his thought.

  “Mojave will be a bit of an adjustment,” he said, and then laughed. “Where did you go to school?”

  “Caltech. I have a BS in physics,” she told him.

  She could see he was staring at her. Sure, she was a little young. If he had Richard Sawyer driving him, at his age he’d have a doctorate, be the head of a research lab and making middle six figures.

  It took an hour to get to Barstow. The older woman directed the cab to her home, then the cab went back up, headed for Boron, another few minutes further west. Hannah had never been much for conversation; she drowsed a bit.

  After the engineer got out, Hannah called the hotel she’d been scheduled into in another ten days. There was no problem with a room, even arriving at nearly nine at night. She paid the cabbie, took her bags into the lobby, checked in and shortly was lying in bed in the bedroom of a small suite.

  For a long time Hannah stared at the ceiling, trying to sleep, trying to make sense of events. She hadn’t looked at her comp until after she was in her room. Gandalf had nearly four hundred million inhabitants.

  Had.

  She thought about that many people subject to “destruction by nuclear bombardment from orbit.” It was impossible for her to sleep. Over and over her mind tried to picture what it would have been like. The terrible flashes, the screams and the cries of pain and terror. Then death.

  With the terrible clarity that only gut-wrenching fear can bring, Hannah finally understood all of the trips with her father. He was trying to kill her. Simply that. He did things what were mildly dangerous for him, much more so for her.

  Long before sleep came, she was in a dizzy spiral of comparison and counter-comparison. Her father wanting her dead, aliens wanting people dead, nuclear weapons exploding, people screaming and screaming and screaming...

  When sleep finally came it was just after dawn. Maybe, Hannah thought, that’s what it would take for her from now on. To have the sun bright and clear in the sky, before she could sleep.

  She surprised herself: she didn’t get up until after noon. She called the lab and talked to the director, Vladimir Horst, telling him she was jet-lagged and would be in the next day. She stood in the shower until she felt more like going out. Since she was starving, she had to. The last meal she’d eaten had been a very early breakfast in Christchurch and that had been more than a day and a half before.

  Hannah found a small restaurant not far from the hotel and sat down and ordered a club sandwich and some french fries. She was still just eighteen years old and college had done nothing to improve her eating habits.

  She’d been sitting for just a few minutes when three people entered the restaurant, greeting the hostess by name. The hostess showed them to a table not far from Hannah. The hostess didn’t, Hannah noticed, offer them a menu. Two of the three newcomers were wearing plain white Fleet Aloft shipsuits. White was the color for command track.

  One of the two wearing a shipsuit was a young man in his mid-twenties. He had three round silver pips on his collar and had a single broad stripe on his sleeve cuff with a smaller half stripe higher on his sleeve. A senior lieutenant. The other person in a shipsuit was an older woman, in her late thirties, Hannah judged. She had two and a half stripes on her cuffs and two silver diamonds instead of round pips on her collar. She was a full commander, the next step from being a captain.

  The last was an older man in his forties. He was tan and fit, wearing civilian clothes. The three talked easily together, the two officers not at all self-conscious about appearing in public wearing the Fleet Aloft duty uniform. Probably, Hannah thought, they were attached to the Fleet Aloft liaison office in Mojave; people whose job it would be to evaluate the work of various contractors -- contractors like her father.

  Hannah kept her eyes downcast, but inside, her mind was spinning out of control. There was a war; millions, maybe billions of people were dead or were going to die. What was her personal, individual responsibility? She was eighteen -- typically someone her age could join the Fleet, where she would then go to a technical school, and after that, spend the next four years of her life in the Fleet. If you wanted to stay in the Fleet, you could opt for college for those who desired to study advanced subjects or more technical training if college wasn’t your forte.

  For generations people had done it that way.

  It wasn’t easy to get into the Fleet. There were roughly three million people at any one time serving in the Fleet. The Fleet consisted of Fleet Aloft, the Port Arm, and the Fleet Marines. Maybe two-fifths of the total were actually Fleet Aloft; more than half were in the Port Arm, and there were only two hundred thousand or so Fleet Marines. There were more than ninety billion humans these days; getting a Fleet slot, even as an enlisted technician, was subject to competitive exam and the same was true for officer slots. All of the slots were reserved for the best of the best. To put it mildly, the competition was intense.

  There were three academies for Fleet officers: Fleet Academy at Maunalua, near Honolulu on Earth, the Gagarin School on Helvetia and the Rim Academy on Fleet World. Eleven thousand Academy slots were up for grabs every year. Hannah had considered trying to get one, but her father had neatly mouse-trapped her.

  You couldn’t get into one of the academies if you had a degree. You couldn’t join Fleet Reserve Officer training courses unless you were eighteen. Universities, a few of them, offered Fleet Reserve Officer training courses, Caltech among them. There were twenty-five thousand reserve officer training slots, so, in theory, they were much easier to obtain.

  Hannah had been too young to get into the Officer Training program at Caltech and now was over-qualified for one of the academies.

  No one had said anything on the news, but now that there was a war it didn’t take a rocket scientist or a Benko-Chang physicist to understand that the Fleet was going to grow. Most of the usual rules for enlistment were going to go by the wayside. Benko-Chang physicists were going to be in highest demand. She could do that. She could. On the spur of the moment, she decided she would.

  Hannah was also sure that her father would go ballistic. For years Hannah had tried to figure out what he really wanted for her, without success. Now, contemplating that what he really wanted was her dead, she was nervous and unsure. Was it paranoia? Was she just misinterpreting a father trying to get close to his daughter after her mother had died in an accident?

  Sawyer Astronautics hadn’t existed before Richard Sawyer married Charlotte Linz, the heir to a German media fortune. Richard Sawyer had been an aerospace engineer back then, working for another company. A very ambitious aerospace engineer who parlayed his dead wife’s money into a company of his own.

  Hannah opened her eyes; she hadn’t even been aware of having shut them. The three were still there, talking easily. Hannah thought the older man must be a civilian employee of the Fleet; he certainly was too easy and casual with the others to be an employee of a contractor. Plus there was that indefinable, but real, aura that he and the other two shared. They were Rim Runners.

  Space exploration, even with Benko-Chang turbines, had started slowly. The first starships were enormously expensive -- in terms of resources, personnel and the time and money needed to build one. Stephanie Kinsella had brought back the first interstellar expedition with only one fatality. The second expedition, out of France and without Stephanie Kinsella, had lost nearly a third of the crew. The fifth expedition simply vanished from the ken of man; no one had any idea what happened to it.

  The solution to cost and quantity had been to move industry into space. Building the initial infrastructure had taken quite some time, and it too proved expensive. Expensive in all ways, but particularly in human lives. Space was like the ocean: a moment’s inattention, a bit of bad luck, the failure of a key component -- those and a million other things killed in an instant. Many of the first explorers had died; so did many of the first groups of people who attempted to live in space.

  Many, but not all. Not even most.

  The solar system’s asteroid belt, particularly the outer belt, was where most people lived and worked in those early days. It was first called “The Outer Rim” and later “The Rim of Space” and finally just “The Rim.” People who lived and worked in space their entire lives became known as Rim Runners. They could run where a dirty-foot from Earth would have to crawl.

  The three in the coffee shop had that aura; Hannah was certain that they were Rim Runners. If nothing else, appearing in public in shipsuits was a classic sign. One of the most common complaints from dirty-feet about Rim Runners was that they were arrogant. Quite simply, Rim Runners weren’t about to compromise safety just because some dirty-foot thought he or she knew better. They would react rudely at first, grading rapidly to violence when someone did something they considered dangerous. They wore what they pleased, when and where they pleased.

  It was after two in the afternoon, Mojave time. The three seemed in no hurry to get back to work even though there was a war on.

  Hannah forced herself to stand and walk towards them. Long before she reached their table all three were watching her.

  “Where could I enlist for the Fleet?” she asked, her eyes downcast.

  “Miss,” the youngest spoke, “you’d be more valuable to the Fleet with a degree.”

  “Assuming,” the woman added, “you’re even out of secondary school.”

  Hannah was tall but she knew she didn’t look as old as some of the other eighteen year olds she knew.

  “I just graduated with a BS in Benko-Chang physics from Caltech.”

  “Ah!” the younger man exclaimed, “that’s different! That would mean you are volunteering, not enlisting. Officers, Miss, volunteer. Enlisted ratings enlist.”

  “Where could I go to volunteer?” Hannah corrected herself.

  “Miss,” this was the older man, the civilian. Hannah flicked her eyes up at him. His eyes were strange; he had old eyes, much older than he looked. His eyes were filled with something Hannah didn’t understand.

  “The Porties need all the help they can get,” he told Hannah. The other two laughed.

  “Fleet Aloft,” Hannah said, correcting him. Her eyes had returned to the ground.

  “Look at me,” the older man commanded.

  Hannah lifted her eyes but not her head and met his.

  “Fleet Aloft, Miss, isn’t for everyone.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and handed her a card. “If you are serious, show up at this address at 1630 this afternoon. Not before, not after. On the dot.”

  “I found her,” the youngest officer said. “No fair you hogging the spoils.”

  “Spoils?” the woman asked.

  “It was in the Fleet Bulletin from this morning. Officers who refer volunteers in certain fields will receive one day of ordinary leave for each one. I do believe Benko-Chang physics is near the top of the list. They are starting a new OTS class in Hawaii in a few days.”

  “She’s too young,” the older man said. “She’s too many things. Lieutenant Anselm, a wager. A dollar says she won’t show up.”

  The young officer looked at Hannah, who looked away, her eyes still down.

  “You will show up, Miss, right?” the lieutenant asked.

  “Yes,” Hannah told him, without looking at him.

  “A wager then, sir,” the lieutenant said, grinning. “I’ll be only too happy to take your money.”

  The older man reached out to Hannah, lifting her chin so she looked right into his eyes. “Two hours and a bit, Miss. I do like money in the bank.”

  He let go, got up and tossed a bill on the table, then walked away. The other two got up and silently followed him.

  Hannah paid her own check and walked slowly back to her hotel, lost in thought. What should she do? The point of the whole exercise was obviously to give her time to take counsel with her fears and decide against the whole idea.