Life In Stormtime

So, Hurricane Laura has passed. I have not updated, other than the story post, due to catching up with everyone in our family, to see how they fared and where they're headed next.

On our end, the storm made little impression. The central spiral of the storm wound itself into a very concentrated force; this is likely connected to the actual wind strength experienced as the storm moved ashore.

A happy accident then was that we were too far west, and out of the fetch region, to see any true effects as Laura pushed through.

However, all our Lake Charles family were effected, from minor (a window shattered by a duck figurine and a few missing shingles) to the catastrophic (one lost business, and my dad's house looks more and more like a total loss the more I see of it. A pine tree topped out and speared through the house when it came down, piercing from the ridge beam all the way to and through the ground floor (it's a 2-story house...)). Pretty much everyone lost parts of the roof, the shingles peeled back under the winds.

Like with Katrina/Rita (semester I finished my doctorate and began a post-doc), circumstances conspire to keep me from hands-on participation in the cleanup effort. I have to travel for the day gig, and I have to observe the safety protocols under covid. A significant part of that being no out of state travel in my blackout periods.

And my boss has, rightfully, grown antsy about the fact that we haven't been able to travel as freely as we had grown used to. Our sites need certain things that only physical presence can provide (welcome to engineering work...). Further, there's pretty much no place to stay in Lake Charles, as my dad and stepmom are bunking with my sister's family for the immediate, and likely extended, duration.

The key element here for Hurricane Laura, so far, is that the majority of folks packed up and headed out. The loss of life was minimal, and this falls into the category of minor miracle.

There are some signs that the Great Forgetting (Gulf Coast Storm Version) is setting in; interviews with folks in Bolivar and High Island indicate that there are many folks there who won't be so quick to evacuate next time.

It's an unfortunate part of what happens when the storm doesn't quite hit you. The hassles you went through, to evacuate and so on, are remembered far more readily than images on the TV screen of what happened just 40 miles away.

It's natural, regrettable, and yet forgiveable, ultimately. We could see another storm tomorrow; it might be 30 years before we see one. That's effectively what happened between Alicia and Ike (barring Tropical Storm Allison, which was a completely different kettle of obnoxious pile of water looking for a place to land), for example. And, if Rita had not come through with only modest relative effect in our corridor, Houston and Harris County would have tried to evacuate the entire five million plus population for Ike. Which would have been catastrophically bad.

Rita gave the county and city that lesson, that it's effectively impossible to completely evacuate a metropolitan area on the timescale of a hurricane (i.e. within a 24-48 hour period, effectively). And the geography with Ike proved that it was unnecessary to do so; even a direct hit by Ike did not cause the kind of destruction that would have justified attempting to make the complete evacuation.

Systemic risk assessment is never complete; there's never a "finished" picture. Things will change that make the current evaluation obsolete. Just be prepared, I guess, to go through the gut-checks next time, rinse repeat as needed.

Life in stormtime, as it were.

In Case of Emergency - A Serendipity Oh Story by M. K. Dreysen

For the last bit before the end of August, this week's free story tells us a bit about Yoa Benevolent, Serendipity Oh, and one stretch of the road the two friends traveled along the way to where we met them last.

In Case of Emergency - A Serendipity Oh Story by M. K. Dreysen

The start of a good beer run should be more epic.

But, everything being the way it was, Serendipity Oh was just glad the run got started. "Whose idea was this trip, anyway?" she asked.

"Yours," came the chorus from the back.

"If that's the way you're going to be..."

"It is. Now shut up and drive." Yoa was, if her tone was any indication, all full up on reasons to not give Sere an inch. Much less a mile.

"Then I guess I'll just turn up the tunes." Sere cranked up the volume, loud enough to drown out the groans.

It wasn't her fault Yoa and Graham were too caught up in the neo-punk scene to appreciate the latest ultrapop stylings. At least she hadn't played Granddad's music; not this time, anyway.

The trip was spring break. The bait she'd offered had been simple: "My grandparents have a place on the water. Sun and sand and beautiful people to drool over."

Which was all true, enough. Sure, there were a couple miles between Granny's place and the Gulf. But compared to the distance between Luna and the Gulf waters, hey, it was practically on the beach. And all you had to do to make the rest of the distance was be willing to put butt in seat and make a little drive every morning.

The beautiful people were, Sere admitted, all sunburnt college students, just like themselves. Hung over from the priors and most of them already paired off for the week. The graveyard tan of the lunatics, and their extended bout of seasickness from Earth's tender embrace weren't conducive, so far, to attracting much attention from the fair ones.

Thus, the beer. Good.

Fifteen miles down the sand, in Granddad's ancient beach mobile? Less good. Or, good in the quiet and the bonfire and the stars above sense of the word. They'd trekked down the beach a ways to make free of the crowds and the noise.

Bad, in the sense of having to bounce back up those miles to get to the store. The one where they kept all the beer.

Sere glanced at the clock, somehow still keeping time despite all the years on Granddad's Toyota. Five past ten in the a.m..

How was she going to kill time until noon? It was Sunday, and it was Texas. Sere would either have to buy breakfast, or she'd be forced to listen to her passengers complain about the barbarian ways of these strange groundhog creatures. Most of all that they wouldn't sell beer until noon on Sunday.

Serendipity had to admit she was out of practice. She'd cleared dirt five days before her eighteenth. Been back, what, half a dozen times or so, since? The ways and means of the world she'd, almost completely, left behind her were almost alien.

Almost. At least she'd remembered before they got to the register at the Kroger.

Her phone saved her, in that moment. Well, really it was Granny on the other end of the phone, but since Sere had dreamt a time or two of a miracle button... "Hey, Granny."

"Love, do you and your heathen fellow travelers think I could interest you in something resembling real food this fine March morning?"

"Granny, if you're up for company, we'll be there with bells on."

The tune sung from the back changed then, from Woe Is Us... to Where's The Food? in record time.

Sere didn't inform her passengers of the fact that, if they wanted hot breakfast served with motherly love, they'd have to put up with a drive. Granny and Granddad's beach house was only a couple more miles up the blacktop.

But that was the one they rented to the tourists. And the occasional granddaughter. Their permanent home was forty-five minutes farther on up the road. Fortunately, the tank was full, and Graham and Yoa weren't fighting the bit all that much. They made it quietly, two drowsing in the back and Serendipity Oh minding the store in the front.

'Singing' at the top of her lungs only occasionally.

"Where's Granddad?" Sere asked, as she started laying out the plates for the troops. "Did you finally hang him up by his toes?"

A threat of longstanding, Sere remembered her grandmother reserving it for when the old man had managed to pull off one of his blunders. Like the time he'd gone out and mowed the yard in shorts.

In the middle of the worst outbreak of fire ants in the past twenty years. In July. In Houston.

She'd nursed him back to health, Granny had. Only occasionally torturing the old man with the tube of ant grease just out of reach. "You old fool. I'd stake you out with a For Sale sign, but no one would pay the shipping on your worthless hide. I ought to let you scratch the skin from your bones."

Granddad had taken the rebuke.

Not quietly. But he'd taken it.

"He's off at some conference. Claims he's keeping up to date for the handful of clients who still return his phone calls." Granny snorted. "It doesn't hurt that the conference is in Denver. And Snowmass has a record base this year."

Which would have been Sere's other option, if she'd thought to ask her grandfather what he had in mind for his spring break. Damnit. Just the thought of Graham and Yoa on skis...

Breakfast was well received. Enough so that cleaning up after themselves didn't rouse any complaints from the help. "Ok, are you two ready to run back down to the beach?"

"Yes indeedy," Graham answered from behind his dishtowel. "Unless your grandmother's making something for lunch?"

"She's off to play cards with some friends. And before you ask, Yoa, no. Those little old ladies make sharks look like kittens. We've got enough trouble saving up tuition money. I'm not putting either one of us in the position of losing it to ladies who play poker twice a week." And enjoy taking each other's pin money.

No, the run was the thing, and the store was, blessedly, finally, selling beer when they made the doors.

Beer, meat, the real on-the-hoof kind, not the tube and vat-grown kind. Chips and cheese and a cart full of other delicacies unimagined in the minds of lunatics far and wide.

Or, at least, unattainable on a college student's budget. "You know you're both paying for this fabulous wealth, right?" A lab assistant's pay being enough to foot the tuition, and the trip down the gravity well.

"We've got it. We might be on peanut butter rations the rest of the semester, but this night we feast!"

Yoa being the optimistic one. "Where's Graham, anyway?"

Their worry-wort accounting major had disappeared. To the bathroom, as it turned out. And people watching. "There's something strange going on at the front, Sere."

"Uh-huh. These strange groundhog ways, Graham?"

"I'm not that much of a tourist, Serendipity. I think I can tell when a place is being robbed."

Robbed. Right. In a place where guns weren't an imaginary threat to all and sundry. "Umm, why don't we just head to the back. Someplace with plenty of bullet catching shelves between us and the party goers?"

"It's not like that, Sere. Come on, I'll show you."

So the three of them, Yoa as convinced of her immortality as the others, slid along a careful path to a safe viewing distance. "There are three of them, I think. The two on either side of the counter, and the one making the demand."

Sere stood at one side of the aisle, Graham easily looking over her head. Yoa took up viewing from the opposite side.

So far as Serendipity could tell, Graham had the right of it. Two and one; the two directing traffic, warning off those who wanted the money orders, the lottery tickets, their bills paid. While the one made his demands.

"They don't look much like..."

And they didn't. Not unless surfers had moved into much more creative financing territory since Sere last checked in with them. Surfer dudes for sure, Sere could almost smell the salt and the sunscreen from across the store. Only, in addition to the board shorts and flip-flops, these dudes had thrown together head-gear.

Big sunglasses hats and bandannas across the lower half of their faces. All three wore their facial recognition gear carefully deployed. "Does that even work anymore?" Sere asked.

Graham snorted. "Maybe. If they've never appeared in a mugshot, they might get away with it. Long enough to disappear somewhere."

"If the lifestyle they're sporting is real, in other words?" Sand gets in everything, Sere reminded herself. There'd be a limit to how long she could go without a real shower.

Serendipity started backing away; Graham went with her, so all she had to do to keep the party together was reach out and grab Yoa's arm. "There's nothing here for us. Give them a few minutes and it'll all be part of the evening news."

Only, the world decided differently. Two wild cards made their play. First, a woman pushing a kid-friendly cart, her toddler yammering about "Chips, Momma" providing commentary, pushed her way through the defending surfer dudes. "I don't care, you're not in line and I am."

The second wild card was the Hero. The one Sere had been worrying would make an appearance. Not that she had an idea what the Hero would look like.

Sere just knew, remembered too well, that there was one in almost every crowd. The red-headed lady would have gone on her way, her week's worth of supplies tucked away in the cart, together with a riot of handmade grocery bags in colors no rainbow would have admitted to.

Relatively tall, gray-streaked hair that testified to the ever present Gulf wind, the Hero would have followed the lead of the checkout clerk and the sacker, nervous quiet and doing nothing more or less important than Ignoring What Was Happening Behind Them.

Except the Hero Noticed. Clued In.

The kid behind the counter, Ryan Teatro, only just promoted from checkout to the front line the week before, he'd opened the front of the store that morning. His manager had stepped out for a smoke. Ryan knew the drill, he'd had a gun pulled on him but at the checkout line, not here. Just keep things calm, empty the drawer right? Get the guy out of the store and safely away from hurting anybody, that's what Ryan's world boiled down to right this minute.

He emptied his cash drawer into the guy's bag. He put the thumbdrive, the one the guy had said to plug into the store's computer system, he put that in the bag. Then the guy pointed at the safe, the one that nobody was supposed to know was there.

The one that was open, because Sally had left it that way when she left for her cigarette. "Three checkers coming in in the next half hour, Ryan. You remember, just pass them their drawers when they clock in." The big door stayed open 'til closing time; the big money drops were behind a smaller door, in the back of the safe.

The guy wasn't worried about the big money drops. He wanted the cash drawers. A couple hundred dollars at a time, it ain't much but it's a living. "Just dump it in, Ryan, and we'll be on our way."

Which, Ryan was more than happy to do. Keep the guy talking, the threat out of sight out of mind rather than ugly in his hand, he'd flashed his shirt to show the gun in his waistband and that had been plenty.

Ryan was thinking about the gun, and not the cash drawer, number two of fifteen; so he dropped the drawer. Which made him jump, made the guy jump, made his traffic control buddies jump.

All of which Clued In the Hero that Something Was Amiss. So the Hero went for her own gun.

And everything went very quickly Straight To Hell.

Sheriff's Deputy Rudy Moreno summed it up that evening; Granny replayed it for Graham and Sere later, once all the dust had settled. "Let me stress this, first," Deputy Moreno started. "Please, no matter how well trained you think you are, please please please let the police handle these things. Protect yourselves, certainly, but don't try and be a hero."

If she'd ever paid attention to that sort of warning, it might have stopped Willa Chapman, Our Hero of the Day. Instead, she pulled her pistol, and then the trigger.

And then she started yelling. "Get your hands up! Get down on the ground! You heard me!"

They did. So one of the crowd-surfers put his face on the tile floor. The other put his hands up. Chapman didn't remember what she'd ordered anybody to do, so she pulled the gun down, from where she'd put the first bullet in the ceiling tiles, and aimed it at the surfer with his hands up. "I said get your hands up!"

The kid blanched, then started blathering. Because a gun in his face wasn't part of the gig, man, this wasn't what he'd set out to get himself into, all they'd signed up for was making sure Mark had time to get the bag filled, and then they'd be running for the water. "I don't... I've already got my hands up, lady..."

Chapman wasn't ready for conversation; confusion wasn't part of whatever script ran through her head that morning. So she pulled the trigger again.

The kid got lucky. Gene Blake dodged the bullet.

Ryan Teatro wasn't so lucky. He caught it. In the shoulder, and his pitching career, such as it was, came to an end that morning. "Kid had a scholarship to UH," Deputy Moreno helpfully told the public. "He's gonna be ok, but the surgeons tell me they're not sure how well he'll recover the arm motion. I'm told his family's setting up a GoFundMe for surgery."

And in the confusion, the whirl of activity that had suddenly become the center of the universe, surrounding one Gene Blake, one Willa Chapman, and one Tommy Murphy, currently pissing himself on the floor while he waited for a bullet to find the top of his head, Mark Hooks, the kid with all the plans and goals that had set all of this in motion, took himself out of the play zone.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, especially for Bea Travers, the mom who'd pushed her cart into line and catalyzed the circus, Mark took Bea Travers's daughter, Grace Travers, with him. "So that bitch with the gun knows not to follow me, lady," Mark told Bea as he hugged Grace, three and one gasp shy of letting her screams fly, to his chest.

Chapman, Our Hero, was too deaf from the gunshots, too focused on the target she'd already missed twice that morning to notice the bigger story.

Gene Blake definitely had other things on his mind than what Mark was up to. Tommy didn't have a view of any of this, he wanted nothing more than to keep, to keep being able to, count the veins in the tiles, just as long as there were veins in tiles to count, and no lead entering body parts that shouldn't have lead in them.

Bea Travers noticed. She started screaming her notice, at about the same time her daughter did. Only, their chorus was a distant harmony; Bea was right in the middle of things, still.

Little Grace, on the other hand, was out the automatic doors and into the parking lot, clutching a bag of Cheetos with one hand and Mark's shoulder with the other.

"Come on," Yoa called, as she ran for the door. Graham took off after her.

"Oh, shit," Serendipity Oh said. And then she started running. "Yoa, hey, this is already off the rails..."

"Worst case," Graham huffed between strides, "We get his car and license plate, and the cops don't have to wait for the cameras."

"Oh," Sere said. And ran harder. That much, she could make sense of.

Yoa with an arm full of little girl, that didn't make sense. "What the hell?"

"Hell," the girl echoed. And then giggled.

"He threw her at me," Yoa supplied. "Which car did he get in?"

Because an armful of wriggling toddler didn't allow much viewing room. Graham and Sere pushed past her, to watch the perpetrator of the whole business squeal out onto the highway in a much newer version of the Toyota beach mobile, an all electric version of the FJ Cruiser Granddad loaned out to Sere and her friends.

"At least it's not yellow," Sere told herself. "What's the plate?"

"TV7 something or other," Graham answered.

They both reached for their phones.

Our Hero added another gunshot. The last one of the day; the one that hit Yoa just north of her tailbone. Yoa fell to the ground, screaming, with Grace adding her own voice to the din. "Y'all just hand over that little girl and get on the ground now, until the police get here. Or do you want another bullet?"

The Hero never did admit what she'd done. She didn't really have to. For all the work Deputy Moreno did, when the news crews showed up, Moreno never came right out and said, "The lady who jumped in to help was the only one who pulled any triggers. The only one who shot anyone."

The forensics ultimately told the story, once the bullets came out of Ryan and Yoa. The sheriff's office published the evidence, under duress because Ryan's parents, and Yoa's, filed a lawsuit against Chapman; Willa avoided the eventual finding of fault via bankruptcy in Texas and re-incorporating in Idaho, where she didn't have to worry about wage garnishment.

Chapman spent the rest of her days as a celebrity at various conventions, selling videos of her "Heroic Self-Defense and The Lonely Sheepdog" speeches. And carefully avoiding reporting any income in forty-eight states.

Ryan recovered use of his arm, if not the pitching talent that would have at least paid for college. Yoa, well. "If the injury had happened here," Doctor Yeun, chief surgeon at Luna's medical school, said, "We would likely have been able to recover most, if not all, of your mobility, Miss Benevolent. As it is, assuming no further damage from lift and setdown here at Luna, I'm afraid the most we'll be able to expect is full control through your abdomen and hips."

"Including organs?" Yoa asked.

"Yes, including bladder, lower GI, and so on. Depending on how the nerve bundles respond, I suspect you'll feel reasonably comfortable as far as somewhere through the lower half of your thighs. But from the knees down will likely be unresponsive."

"I'm alive, and so's Grace Travers, Doctor. There are worse places to be."

Serendipity Oh would always remember that conversation, and the strength on Yoa's face as she accepted the way of it all.

Maybe, Sere thought, maybe she doesn't fully believe it, yet. But Yoa was damned sure going to try and accept it. The determination was there, etched into every new line on Yoa's face.

But that, the conversation where Yoa found out how much of a difference a gravity well and a difference of professional opinion on the methods for treating severe spinal injuries had made to her life, the lawsuits that would consume much of her spiritual energy over the next few years, even the nightly news segments where Deputy Moreno and his fellow officers tried to make sense of a screwed up Sunday morning, all of these things came after Graham and Serendipity settled one more item of business.

"Hooks comes from money," Sere found. "Mom's got the name in Brazoria County, dad's people are from Houston."

"How'd they get him out of reach of the cops?" Graham asked.

Mark Hooks called Mom as soon as the tires hit the road. "I'm in trouble," he said. "The cops are going to be looking for me."

"Drive to Ellington Field," she told him. "We'll have people waiting for you."

And so they did. People, the pilot of the family plane first of all. The family lawyer, second of all. The pilot filed the flight plan after they took off.

"You're going to the station at L5, first," the lawyer told Mark. "Then, once we arrange everything, Luna."

"College. Again?" Mark responded.

"No, not college." Katie Leonard managed not to make the face, the disgusted one. She'd already had to clean up his mess at Rice. "The company maintains a handful of subsidiaries off world. You'll be working for the construction division, most likely." Which you'd know if you'd have bothered to pay any damned attention at the board meetings your mother forced you to attend, Katie didn't add. "Keep your head down long enough for us to make this all go away."

"Or what?" Mark demanded. "You can't force me to stay there, Katie."

"No one's forcing you to do anything, Mark." That would take a tranquilizer drip and an asteroid facility. Which the family didn't have available. Yet. "But a little cooperation, for a relatively short time, and you should be able to move freely. Maybe even surf again. Otherwise, you'll spend the next decade or two looking over your shoulder for the Texas Rangers."

The heir apparent turned away from the lawyer, dismissing her in favor of the landscape flying by the jet window.

Katie shrugged. The Hooks kid would be out of her hair for the next year or two, she hoped. She'd have court filings and research and payoffs to manage, but at least she wouldn't have the urge to strangle the little bastard staring her in the face every minute of it.

She never asked why Mark had done it. What could three thousand dollars, less than a week's worth of his allowance, matter? Except for the sheer mad joy of the gun and the scared look on the Teatro kid's face. For Leonard, it was just another one of the Hooks kid's troubles, in line with all the other ways he'd found to shake shit up when it got too quiet for him.

It was the first time the Hooks machinery had dealt with the off-world environment for something like this. Mark had had to cool his heels after the Rice debacle; but Ecuador had been far more accepting of 'financial misbehavior', the least of the accusations the university had leveled.

The only formal one that made it past the review committee. The others Leonard had scrubbed from the records with a judicious application of donation money. She'd let the cost of damages done fly to give the Rice professors a bone to chew on. Either way, Mark Hooks had flown to Ecuador, to a resort H-Adaptive Realty purchased for the occasion.

Katie had arranged a passport for him, an identity that wouldn't matter once Mark came back to the States, but that would keep him off the radar of anybody with kidnapping as part of their business plans.

She did the same thing here. Mark Hooks flew from Midland Spaceport to the L5 habitat. Six weeks later, Matt Honore took the shuttle flight from L5 to the lunar surface, where he'd signed up as an apprentice welder on the next phase of the dark side telescope expansion project. Three years of five twelves a week, night shift local time, overtime to bank, a pretty typical young person's path so far as the H-Regia Construction, Limited, and Katie Leonard, lawyer, viewed things.

That was their regular interaction with the lunar authorities; Leonard went on about her business, the part where she started the defensive court filings and the cash deposits. Especially a significant anonymous deposit covering Yoa Benevolent's medical care.

And a matching amount to the Luna medical school in the name of H-Regia. Leonard figured it would be better safe than sorry; besides, the HRCL team would always need good medical care, with the construction jobs in a rough environment. The company looked after their own, it was one of the benefits they didn't discuss with the new folks until they'd worked at the company more than a few years.

Sere watched the news. The local Houston news. She worked to remember the cadences, the little ways the reporters hinted at the what and who and how moving beneath the surface. "The reporters know more than they're willing to talk about on camera," she told Graham.

"That's normal, isn't it?"

"Yeah," she admitted. "No different than Luna. I'm just out of the habit of translating Houston politesse."

Graham set himself the task of sifting through the various government databases. "After automating it. There's just so damned much of it."

The L5 station had made the choice, years back, to just let most of their databases be open to the public. "They're such a target, there wasn't any damned point. They control write access absolutely."

"That, and the important stuff isn't open to the public."

"Well, sure, hide it in the junk pile where there's so much other juicy goodness to dig through."

Graham's bots sniffed out the Hooks kid. And, that he'd lifted for Luna under a different name.

"That tells me his minders didn't understand how different the off-world is than down-well," Sere said, when Graham showed her the 'Matt Honore' lunar leg of the switch. "I.D.'s matter downwell, but nothing like they do on orbit."

The data systems didn't much care what the paperwork identifications claimed. 'Matt Honore' was just another label in the reference list for the mass and associated life systems associated with the original label of 'Mark Hooks'. Ninety-seven kilos, twenty-three standard years, oxygen-food-water consumption and assorted evacuations as baselined. He could call himself whatever he wanted; for L5 and Luna and the budding Mars-Asteroid and Venus systems he was measured, sorted, evaluated for all travels according to off-world rules alone.

The ISS didn't share that database; neither did any of the groundhog governments. At this particular point in time, these were life-system engineering data shared between research environments.

At this point, though, from Earth's point of view, what the lunatics and the marvins did between themselves was less than interesting.

Six weeks after Matt Honore hit the lunar surface, Sere had him traced.

The question was... "What do we do about it?"

Vacuum exposure, rockfall. An accident on rocket transportation. Graham and Sere debated them all. "Problem being, convenient accidents have been 'addressed'," Graham said. "The board doesn't want the old ways returning."

"Las Vegas Syndrome," Sere replied. "Nobody wants the rumors to turn into fact." And they hadn't, not really. A couple of Jimmy Hoffa's had occur ed, in the first rush, so the board had cracked down.

Like L5, some of the databases were sacrosanct from public knowledge. Security cameras and their equivalents were near ubiquitous, and impossible to evade. Or, near as as to make no practical difference for a couple of college kids with no clearance and access to the real computing iron.

On the other hand, medical procedures were not quite as locked down. "Too bad they'd twig to a kidney replacement," Sere mused.

"Or any other major surgery under anesthesia."

The only access points were routine vaccinations. The mundane public health stuff. "We could make him line up for an MMR shot every six months, plus the various flu vaccines."

"Annoying, but how'd that be any different than normal? He wouldn't even notice." You became inured to it; every six months on your personal timelines, three months if the terrestrial disease vectors overloaded, the off-world rolled sleeves for whatever latest round of needle pushing had been deemed necessary.

All essential, given the way groundhog flu spread.

Sere remembered something else, then. But only because she'd started teaching the occasional lab class. "Hey, one of my students told me she didn't just get her flu shots. They'd piggy-backed something else into it for her, for childhood leukemia or something."

Graham squinted, confused, then went off to do some homework. He came back a few days later with the answer. "Not just cancer." The ever present worry. They lived in a radiation environment, constant exposure in the caverns or the L5 station wasn't all that much more entertaining than living in Denver or Mexico City.

But they were still kids. The folks working the surface of Luna, Mars, the asteroids caught larger daily doses. And the experimental drugs to go along with it. "Ok, so?"

"At least a few of the drugs they're giving out are gene editors."

"Ah. Graham..."

"I know what you're thinking. Here's the twist."

And so they pushed through a little script for Matt Honore; one that would follow his records all the rest of his days in the off worlds.

And then home again, when the DirtWorlders wanted to know what the lunatics and the marvins had done to their precious Mark Hooks.

Not a gene editor injection. The kind that came with warning bells and whistles, telling all and sundry that, while the individual injected would likely have a ten percent overall improved lifetime, the subject should be considered as EXTREMELY HIGH RISK for mutagenic side effects carrying down to any offspring. AS SUCH, this patient should be strongly advised to SEEK GENETIC COUNSELING PRIOR TO ANY POSSIBLE PREGNANCY or CONSIDER STRONGLY LIFETIME NEUTERIZATION OR OTHER PREVENTION METHODS against accidental procreation.

No, Sere and Graham didn't arrange for any permanent genetic-modifying injections for Mark/Matt. Nope.

They just made sure the warning that went along with such injections got inserted into his permanent records.

The long-term birth control, long term but easily reversible for a physician who knew of it, that was administered automatically on his next routine vaccination as triggered by the flag in his records, was just a happy accident. One that was then wiped from Mark's records just as 'accidentally'.

It was really too bad that Mark Hooks never paid attention to his Luna paperwork. He was too busy counting the days 'til he got back to Terra, to money and privilege and the new high-society possible girlfriend his mother had told him so much about.

We Name The Storms...

We name the storms so that we don't forget.

Ike, every big building on Galveston Island has a line marked, showing how high the water came. In Corpus, Andrew, and Carla, are their storms.

Rita took down something like 40 or more mature trees on my dad's place, about 3 acres. Beech, red oak, pine, most of them in the 60 to 70 year age range.

We were living in the Montrose area in Houston when Ike came through, renting the back half of a house that had 3 big pecan trees around it, 140 years old or so. Pecans shed their limbs in big storms.

When I walked out that morning, the back yard was covered in limbs and debris to over my head, seven or eight feet deep pretty uniformly. It was a long night, listening to the storm roll around us. The cats were definitely not amused, but the four year old mostly slept through it.

When Alicia came through, mom and I were living out north and west of Houston. But the storm, when it moved through downtown, was reasonably well televised. We watched glass sheets torn from the highrise buildings and fly through the empty streets.

About ten or twelve miles from our house, when the eye passed through one of the neighborhoods, a guy came out of his house, to watch the quiet. The back side of the eyewall came through while he was out surveying the damage, and killed him.

People left Cameron Parish, and south Calcasieu Parish, when Rita came through.

Because they remembered Audrey. My great-grandparents were living just off Common street, just north of McNeese State University.

When Rita came in, she pushed her waters up just south of the Lake Charles airport.

Audrey pushed all the way to where McNeese is today. When my great-grandfather and grandfather went out the next morning, to help rescue folks south of town and into Cameron Parish, they launched their boats from Gulf Highway.

Just north of where Burton Coliseum is now. They pulled bodies from the canals and the marsh for days. So when Rita came through, and now with Laura coming, people leave. Everyone understands, you can rebuild.

If you're alive to do it.

We name the storms because we're here, and they ain't. And that's the way we want it to continue to be.

Hurricane Watch, Flags Out, Laura's Coming In

If anyone is wondering, no, waiting for a storm to come ashore is not something I recommend. Indeed, waiting is the hardest part. First, for the storm to meander through pressure zones. And then, for the long hours while it makes its move.

Right now, family friends and neighbors in the red zones are trying to decide where they'll run to, or on the road that way if they've already made their committment. Ain't none of it fun. Knowing not what you'll come back to.

We're staying put; we've been through a couple storms now in our present location, so have some knowledge of what the local geography has in store for us. We're out of the evacuation zone, anyway. It'll be the afterward where things get interesting.

So, Laura is headed our way.

Actually, let me return to the waiting bit. It being 2020, there was a, mercifully brief, moment where both Marco and Laura were projected to hit our area within 24 hours of each other. The ensemble tracks in that particular simulation run got everyone's attention.

Nobody sleeps on a storm on the Gulf Coast, but that particular forecast, brief as it was, focused everything down. If you've loved ones here in the path, now's the time where they need your best wishes.

About 48 hours from now will be when they need your help, if and where you can. Keep well keep safe, and let's all be kind for a while. We're all going to need it.

Stuff I've Been Enjoying - 8-23-2020

Recovery Man, and The Retrieval Artist, both by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Fair warning, once you've read either of those and done any digging, you'll realize I'm pulling that old reader's fast one: I'm talking about books in a series, and without reference to the order of the series.

Which, ok, but I have an answer for that. In this series, Rusch pulls off that wonderful trick of writing each book in such a way that I dove into Recovery Man completely blind to the Retrieval Artist series, and enjoyed it so much I bought The Retrieval Artist as soon as I was done.

Let me back up. Gather round children, and let me tell you of the olden times... the before times... those ancient days when you could pack up a bag of books you'd finished, wander to your used book store, and wander out with a handful of books you hadn't read before.

You know. February.

Which was when this particular group of readers had our last trip to Half Price Books in person. We wandered down on what was supposed to be a shelf clearing expedition. And I came out with Recovery Man stashed in with the rest of the books that claimed our cash.

I didn't clue in to that Recovery Man was in the middle of a series until a couple chapters in. But by then, just like a Travis McGee, a Nero Wolfe, a Columbo, Rusch had me set up perfectly.

I knew these folks, I knew where they'd come from. And I wanted very much to find out what happened to them.

Detectives. In space. With kidnappings, a too-smart for her own good teenager trapped in an AI house, and a race between rocket ships, hey now.

And Rusch always with that subtle eye, that comfortable nudge in the ribs... you know the one, when your best friend and you both notice the odd things, the little troubles that no one else seems to pick up on? This is a future where edge cases and friction bearing surfaces, people, struggle to find spaces to survive.

So yeah, the next book is waiting in my to-be-read pile. I'm in. Thank you, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, for the Retrieval Artist and the world he lives in.

Watch The Hands - An R. M. Danelev, Esq., Story by M. K. Dreysen

It's been a while since we checked in on R. M. Danelev and company. I wonder what they've been up to... Ah.

Dear reader, for this week's free story, Randi and company seem to have taken themselves to a winter break at Disneyland. I wonder what could have persuaded them to hie off for the West Coast?

Watch The Hands - An R. M. Danelev, Esq., Story by M. K. Dreysen

"Ah, Randi," Jack Tanglewilde said. "It's so unfortunate you've stepped outside your comfort zone like this."

Randi had spent three days an uncomfortable guest of Jack's team. She wasn't in the mood for banter.

That said, there were, unfortunately, parts to be played. "Since when are you so territorial, Jack?"

The older man, a self-contained, well-dressed, on the way to somewhere important type, shrugged. "Call it the side effect of age, Randi. I'm not interested in traveling, these days. So I'm in the position of needing to defend a certain amount of real estate. For my own best interests, of course."

They sat in a conference room; a small one, the oval table just big enough for four, six if they wanted to rub elbows. Randi had her end, Jack the other.

The main difference between the two being that Jack had Randi's phone and laptop arrayed before him. "You've been busy, Randi. Richard's been kind enough to show me your 'vacation' photos. And notes. Perhaps you'd like to share a little more information?"

The phone and laptop told a story of a job in the planning. She'd chosen the hotel because it stood across the street from the bank. The country club and the golf course that the high-end hotel shared space with helped.

Long walks with a good camera, and a little bit of that sunny Southern California weather. She'd had worse winter breaks. "You know better than that, Jack. I don't ask my clients for too much information. Not when the checks clear."

Jack chuckled. "A convenient enough excuse, Randi. A bank doesn't really fit that story, though. It looks a great deal like you've finally started branching out on your own. You'll forgive the pun, of course."

In other words, Jack didn't buy the idea that someone had hired her, and the team, to knock off a bank. It was too... pedestrian. Commercial, if you will.

Randi wanted to smile. Not at the pun. At the way her team's reputation proceeded. After all, the money was only half the pleasure. "I'd be guessing, you understand..."

"Please do," he countered. "I always appreciate a good hypothesis."

"There were two conditions on the job. That it occur on a specific date." She stopped.

Jack nodded. "A distraction, then? Go on."

She'd have said that the rest of the confession was a result of three days in a room by herself. Not a bad room, as these things go, really it was a poor man's copy of the generic hotel suite. Bathroom, bed, t.v., a tray of mediocre food for breakfast and dinner. "And that we replace the FBI tracking devices with alternate versions. Supplied by the client."

"Ah, now that's interesting, that is," Jack said. He pushed his chair back from the table, slid his hands behind his head, and relaxed. Or, at least, appeared to. "Which implies..."

"A rental car, left at the Farmer's Market garage, bags in the trunk." She shrugged. "That's all I know, Jack."

He stared at the ceiling now. "What was the date?"

"Unsupplied, as yet, except that we had at least six months to plan and coordinate. They're supposed to provide a date and time along with the devices."

Jack shook his head; then, he sat up and rolled his way back to the table. "You'll forgive me if I don't return your phone and computer. You've put some work into the job, and I'd hate for it all to go to waste." He shut the laptop, slid it and the phone into the case they'd come along in. "You'll provide me with the contact information I need, of course?"

Or, she assumed, she'd find out how deep is the Pacific. She sighed. "Yeah, I'll give you the email address. What's the catch, Jack?"

"Keep quiet for a while, Randi. No jobs. Let's all pretend you're still working this one. And you'll walk away clean."

"Can I at least go to Disney? I've already got the tickets."

He chuckled. "Sure, why not? Take a spin on the Teacups for me, won't you? They'll always be my favorite."

Randi didn't ask him if he intended to fulfill the contract terms. That was understood. Jack was going to burn bridges for her. The information the tracking devices and the date certain would provide were for Jack and his team to benefit from in other ways.

"Such a shame," Yala told her.

Randi had her day at the park; she'd taken a seat at a table on Main Street, for a hot dog and fries and a warm cup of hot chocolate. Every table having some occupant or another, Yala sitting down at one of the empty seats was quite natural. Randi gave her the thumbnail sketch of the past three days.

And Jack's conditions. "All things considered, it could have been worse, Yala."

"Granted. But does a life's reputation go so easily?"

Randi had more thoughts on that question than she knew what to do with. Twelve hours of free time since Jack's crew pulled the blindfold from her face, in front of the Sheraton a few blocks away... She'd put her feet up in that hotel room and tried as best she could to ignore the train of second guesses.

It hadn't really worked. "I'm wondering if Father Wayne wasn't right."

"How's that?" Yala replied.

"Some things we just have to take on faith, Yala." Randi ditched the remains of lunch, then dug out the park map folded into her pocket. The park's phone app might have advantages. Too bad the burner phone she'd picked up that morning didn't have the grunt to go along with it. "The sail boat, you said?"

"She's on the evening shift, you've got a couple hours. They're pulling it into the maintenance dock first thing."

"See you in a few, then."

As with the rest of the trip, Randi's Disney run was part of a working vacation.

The map of L.A. and surrounds, and that Manhattan Beach was only a couple miles from the water, had put the idea in her mind. Dave had been the one with an old friend. "Ginnie's good people. Sami knows her, she helped us put together that equipment package for the Heights job, remember?"

Fourteen ultra high-end gaming rigs, network gear, VR wear, and the tools that went along with the modifications they'd added to the BioHack tournament's sanctioned equipment. The hardest part hadn't been the equipment, or getting it into the tournament unnoticed. Nope, the hard part of that job had been ignoring the incredulous looks from the teenagers competing in the tournament.

"Grandma" had been Randi's handle; that she could have feasibly been the grandmother of some of the kids vying for the BioHack money only made the moniker worse. "We'll just pretend she worked on something else for you, Dave. You don't have to go and mention the specifics, you know?"

Ginnie ran the pirate's sail boat through the Disneyland lagoon. "It ain't much of a boat, when you get down to it."

Other worlds, jobs, that would have been when Randi asked something like, "Why not a fishing boat, or a pilot's gig?"

Their world, they all had a similar reason for the day job with a flexible schedule: camouflage that didn't care much if you occasionally took a week or month off. Same reason Randi's jobs were always timed for winter and summer breaks.

"How much work would it take to get that landing craft Sami found down here?" New build of an old design, updated for the modern era. Sami had found the slightly used landing craft, a perfect price and the owner was willing to do a cash deal, even handle the paperwork.

Only problem was the boat and owner were almost to the Oregon border. Eight plus hours of driving, at least.

"Rent the truck, pay for the airfare, it's not a big deal. Only question is timing."

Randi liked Ginnie's attitude. "How much warning do you need?"

"Couple days should do it. If it's like you said?"

A day to fly up. A day to drive down. Put the boat in the water, and wait outside the surf line for a couple wayward souls in need of a ride. "Yeah, three days for the job, a fourth day for you to do whatever suits you with the boat."

Though, technically, the boat wouldn't be involved in anything obviously criminal, Ginnie wasn't interested in keeping any loose threads tied to her own hands. "Right. You said you didn't care what I did with it..."

"So long as the boat's never going to appear in anyone's list. And we know when you're happy with the what and the how."

Ginnie extended a hand. "You, me, we think the same way, Randi. It's a pleasure to work with a pro. Just tell me when."

Randi took the hand, but remained seated while Ginnie made her way back to the pirate's boat. Yala took the empty spot on the park bench, a large cup of coffee steaming in her hands.

"I'm jealous. Where's the Starbucks?"

"Main Street. Isn't this some shit? What happened to the California weather I was promised?"

The sun and the mild temperatures having fled somewhere to hide. Their day at the park had started out cold, cloudy, and now the wind had come on enough to turn the idea of buying an overpriced sweatshirt from a dream to a life's goal.

"It went well, Yala. Unless you're hiding a masochistic urge somewhere..."

"I left it in my other pants."

"Then I for one am headed back to my nice warm hotel room. Catch up to you in a few days."

The hardest part of the next two days was the pretending she didn't know she was being followed. Jack's team was good, almost as good as her own, Randi admitted.

But Jack's team had allowed themselves to be lulled by access to her phone records. They knew which flight she took that evening, back to Houston. They booked their own seats, last minute, on the same flight.

And, Randi was happy to note, the same pair who accompanied her on the nonstop back to Hobby were the same pair that had spent the day trailing her in Disney.

"They took the first LAX flight this morning," Marlan told her.

They had plenty of time to discuss it, in the cab of the box truck filled with the team's gear. Twenty-six hours of driving leaves plenty of time for discussion.

"Jack had more than enough time to send someone ahead of them," Randi pointed out.

"There's an awful lot of highway between here and L.A., Randi. If they had anyone staged, we'll spot them soon enough."

The two of them went through it all. Sami, Dave, and Yala were holed up in a rented house in Newport Beach. Squeaks was out on Catalina. Yala and Dave had the uniforms and the security car ready to go; Sami was communications lead for this job.

"I took the bigger truck so that they'd have plenty of room for the drive back," Marlan said. "We don't have all that much gear for this one."

A few computers, radios, a couple of wi-fi rigs. The speakers and the lasers, the equalizer board and the fog machines were there for the cover story.

Or, for anything that might come up. Which, such things have a way of doing. The special phone, the one Marlan handed to her as soon as she'd climbed up to the passenger seat, chose that moment to ding, and let them know that such things really were on offer. "It's Jack, letting the 'client' know he, we, are ready to do the job."

"You have the manifests, right?"

"Yep." A handy list of high-dollar, low-profile cargoes coming in to LAX over the next six months. Rough-cut diamonds, specialty motherboards for specialty applications; a custom, solar-powered ultralight with very specific cargo handling capabilities. "Our old clients were happy to provide a little information."

And all of them, even though their particulars wouldn't necessarily stick out when Jack's team started digging, with insurance values more than high enough to send little bells chiming in the heads of those who know. The little bells of greed. "Which one, do you think?"

Which one looked like the kind of cargo worth hijacking? "Diamonds are a girl's best friend, seems like I've heard that a time or two."

"A cliche, don't you think?"

"Keep it simple, Randi. The way those manifests are written, Jack will have to dig around to find out why the insurance value is so high on such a small volume case. Once he's done that kind of work, he's halfway there already."

"The story does kind of write itself, doesn't it? Ok, and that's April twenty-third, ten a.m., coming in on the Lufthansa flight."

"Don't forget the tracking devices."

"Right, thank you, 'we' will send him the tracking devices the day before, so his team won't have time to mess with them. Ok, email sent, done."

They waited patiently for the sent folder to show that the email had gone through. And then, they waited some more, for Jack to reply back with "Roger, accepted."

Randi let the road spool out; they were two hours out of Kerrville, the last stop before the longest stretch of flat and boring on I-10. Marlan listened to Marvin Gaye preach it, Sam Cooke twist it, and Julio Yglesias croon it before Randi came back from wherever she'd gone to chase second thoughts.

The click of the buttons on her phone, then the ding when her text went through, the one that told the team "We're go." These little sounds told him she'd come back to the moment, and that they were all set to shift to the next gear. "Think that place in El Paso is still open?"

Little hole-in-the-wall joint, just outside the Lockheed-Martin offices. Marlan and Randi had spent most of a month in El Paso, once; they'd been forced to remind themselves not to dive into Reynaldo's enchiladas and tamales every day of the week. This had been no easy task, but the job security necessary had won out. Grudgingly.

"They were never open for dinner, Marlan, remember?"

"Shit." They'd pull into El Paso by ten p.m., if the winds held and they didn't hit ice on the climb. Seven hours of sleep, and then back to the drone of the diesel. "Breakfast, then."

"Deal."

The weather cooperated, and the Motel 6. Reynaldo's place, not so much. "He shut it down a couple months back," the hotel clerk informed them.

Marlan had braced her about it as soon as they checked in. "So my stomach knows it can look forward to something more substantial than Jack in the Box for breakfast."

"If I'd known you were going to spend the past few hours torturing me with Reynaldo's cooking, I'd have brought headphones," Randi said to Marlan. "Ok, then there's someplace else where we can get a breakfast almost as good, right?" she asked the desk clerk.

"Sure," and she'd given them a name, a little bit higher end joint, open bright and early for huevos and chorizo and salsa and right off the feeder road, so they didn't have to dare the streets with the box truck.

"Satisfied?" Randi asked, once they'd both finished way too much of the enormous breakfast plates set before them.

"It'll do," Marlan answered. And then they were back on the road.

Halfway between Tucson and Phoenix, just more than halfway to sunset, Sami sent them a text. "Looks like the other team's starting their run."

"Details?" Randi texted back.

"Dave says they're set up with a maintenance truck. They're here to work on the bank building's generator."

The one Randi had written into her laptop, the one Jack 'borrowed', as sitting conveniently in the middle of the bank's parking lot. Brick wall around three-quarters of it, a chain link fence with embedded tarp for access. Measures enough, she'd written, to maybe scare off the casual teenager.

But not enough to worry a pro. Or even slow one down, as Jack's team appeared to be ready to demonstrate.

"Next thing, you'll tell me they have a chopper."

"Umm, well, about that..."

One of the other little details Randi had noted: that the bank's parking lot had plenty of room for a small helicopter to land. If anyone thought that might be necessary for any particular reason.

"A two-seater has been by a couple times this morning. Two rotations each time, and then off to wherever."

Randi chuckled. "I wonder if Jack's stopped to think this through."

"You wrote it up just like we were doing it, Randi."

"I know that. You know that. But put the shoe on the other foot? Would we trust a plan that dropped into our laps like that?"

"Oh, hell no. We'd have dropped it like a hot rock."

The rest of the drive was quiet; except for the drop onto the 110, when the curves and the traffic and the construction took over every bit of Randi's attention, they both of them worried about what could go wrong.

They pulled into the warehouse in San Pedro just before midnight. "Traffic sucked?" Sami asked.

Randi shrugged away the driving stress as best she could. "L.A. story, same as always. Where are Dave and Yala?"

"Pizza and beer run."

"Thank God," Marlan said. "But before we get to the sustenance of the soul, where's the pisser?"

Needs must; Marlan, then Randi, finished their rotation through the restrooms, and then the team sat down to the occasion.

The job discussion came only after they'd each finished a beer; or, in Yala's case, a Mountain Dew. Before that, they ragged each other about minor things. This was the ritual. Sami had drawn the short straw this time; her oldest kid was almost ready for her license.

"She's finished with the classes, ya'll, she passed the test at the driving school, all she's gotta do is go down to DPS and hand in the paperwork." Sami shook her head. "I can't figure it out, I couldn't wait to drive. Lessa couldn't care less."

"At least the dates haven't started," Dave countered. "Ward's had so many girls over this fall, I've lost count. His mother wouldn't care, except the last couple have dietary restrictions. We don't know whether we can't order pizza, Chinese, or what on any given Friday."

Marlan and Yala commiserated; each of their own broods were off to college at this point, but the hazards of the teenager set weren't so far in the rearview they couldn't appreciate the funny business of it all.

Randi sympathized; and, she thanked herself, quietly, for having gone a different route.

The job part of dinner, once they got to it, had its details. But what it all boiled down to was, when? "When are they going for it?" Randi asked for the whole team.

The look passed around the table, Dave, Yala, Marlan, Sami, then back to Randi. "Tomorrow, if they're really using your plan, Randi. The maintenance truck could show up a few times without causing any notice."

"Had to wait for a part," Yala supplied. "Did what we could, part came in yesterday, a few more hours and we are out of your hair, mister."

Marlan nodded. "But the helicopter's another story."

Dave chimed in now. "Hey Jo, is that the same chopper we saw yesterday?"

"Yeah, it looks like it, Bob," Sami answered. "Maybe we should call LAPD."

"Or the FAA," Dave said. "Ask them what's going on."

"Probably just someone scouting a movie location," Sami continued. "It's Los Angeles. But just in case..."

Randi had worked the bank as her team's job. So far as all the notes on the laptop were concerned. She'd paused before putting the note in, the one that read "A chopper might be useful; low profile though, too much time in the area and people will talk." She'd worried that kind of note might feel too much like an elbow jab.

Or stage directions. "Either way, whenever they pull it, we're all on the clock now. Are you two satisfied that Marlan and I can hide in plain sight?"

In the truck in the hotel parking lot, across from the country club and ready to go when they were signaled.

Yala and Dave nodded. "You're good," Yala answered. "So long as you come in before the LAPD arrive."

"We'll wave you around to the freight doors, and from there we're golden."

"Just another part of the daily traffic."

The daily traffic being the food and service deliveries, for the big luxury hotel, and the country club. The two building complexes separated by only a driveway. Marlan and Randi pulled into the hotel's postage stamp of a parking lot the next morning.

Yala and Dave came on shift at six a.m., as security guards the country club had added for their event.

The Member's art collection exhibit, an annual blowout. It ran through the end of January. A chance for the club members to throw a little gate money to a charity. And to enjoy some bragging rights between collectors.

And, for the past few years running, Le Grand Mazarin, diamond of kings, had retained pride of place in the show.

"Think they'll finally admit who owns it?" Marlan asked.

The diamond itself held the virtual ribbon; whoever owned it still refused public bragging rights, even in the country club. Randi shook her head in response to Marlan's question. "The club will take the hit. It's part of what they get paid for."

The two of them watched the generator crew work across the street. Jack's team were 'testing' the generator, in the hour before the bank opened. When doing so wouldn't disrupt business hours.

And, before the bank manager showed up to ask why the generator crew had people inside the vault.

Marlan started the truck when the lights across the way flickered.

"Huh," Randi grunted.

"What?" Marlan asked. In between squeezes of the steering wheel, hard enough he worried he'd break it.

"I didn't think the parking lot lights would be part of the circuit, that's all."

Marlan pulled the truck out of the hotel parking lot, and into the country club driveway, where they saw the helicopter lights winking overhead. Before the rotor sounds came in, as Dave waved them around to the freight door, Randi sent the text. "Call it in."

Sami did so. "Yes, there's a bank robbery in progress in Manhattan Beach."

"LAPD, FBI are responding," she texted to the team. "Get ready."

The chopper was touching down in the parking lot. Not that Randi and Marlan had time to watch it now. They were busy unloading the laser and fog show. "I figured you'd want the insurance," Marlan told Randi as they set the machines next to the Mazarin's secured glass case.

"The LAPD is distracted at the moment, let's not burden them with this. They don't need the aggro really."

The fog and the lasers did the job; they allowed the diamond's alarm system to believe it was still untripped long enough for Randi to slip the pink beauty out and into a waterproof aluminum case. The case was just about the size of a wedding ring box.

Randi placed a carefully manufactured, but quite ordinary, rock in the Mazarin's place. "Here's hoping we had the weight correct."

"Or, at least, that nobody notices until we're long gone. Let's beat feet."

Across the street, Jack's team were loading vault bags into the helicopter. When Marlan pulled the truck around to the front, off in the distance, flashing lights indicated that LAPD's finest were about to make their appearance.

"Wait for it, or go now?" Marlan asked.

"Go. Take the gift when it's on offer." This part of the plan, they'd assumed the cops would have already arrived, and they'd have to sit and wait for traffic control to intervene. Since L.A. traffic hadn't yet taken a hand in things, all Marlan needed to do was to pull out onto the suburban street and drive, carefully, away.

Randi ducked down onto the floor of the passenger side. "Just in case. Jack's distracted, but if he ever has cause to review security footage, let's make sure he doesn't have the faintest hint I've been here."

"Right. Send the text, won't you?"

"We're clear," she sent out.

"Right behind you," Dave responded. Yala was driving, the car with the security company's logo staying a nice easy distance behind the box truck.

"You should be clear," Sami said. "LAPD is pulling in now."

The on-site team members heard the sirens and watched the lights and cars roar in.

Safely behind their team and the getaway. "Chopper's taking off," Dave texted.

The rest of it went quietly. Marlan pulled up at the end of the pier. He and Randi jumped down from the truck, Dave climbed in to take over. Ginnie waited for them both, the landing craft ramp resting on the sand.

Randi stopped, patted her pocket, first thing, where the Mazarin rested. Then, she surveyed the truck, the car, and the boat. "Got it all under control?" she asked Dave.

"We're good."

Yala pulled the magnetized security logo signs from the car doors, then handed them over to Randi. "Long drive ahead."

They'd sell the car for cash; the buyer was scheduled to meet them in Palm Springs in a few hours.

"Take care," Randi said. Then she and Marlan climbed aboard the boat. Ginnie eased the landing craft out past the surf line. When the ride calmed down, Randi texted Squeaks.

"You all set?"

"Yep. See you in a couple hours."

Time enough for Jack to escape in his helicopter, leaving his team members to the mercies of the FBI. For Yala and Dave to sell the car and start arguing over whose turn it was to drive the box truck with all the equipment. For Squeaks to reassure the nervous cutout their client had arranged with "They're on the way", but only half a dozen times or so.

For Randi to text Sami, and she reassured herself it was only following up, doublechecking, NOT being a pain the ass worry wart: "Any indication the alarms went off?"

The club alarms, whether the technological kind, or the meatspace kind when the club employees finally looked inside the case.

"Nothing yet," Sami replied each time Randi sent the question.

And, finally, time enough for all of the team members to peel off the facial prosthetics they'd worn for the job. "At least we only needed them for one day," Marlan pointed out.

Yala and Dave had had to wear the silicon masks every day since January 1st, when the display had opened.

Marlan and Randi threw their face masks into the ocean, along with the security company signs. Yala and Dave both wanted to stuff their masks into the first garbage can they passed, but that was out. Too many finger prints, and DNA, until they could set up a proper disposal method the masks went into a trash bag they kept between the seats of the truck.

Randi waved goodbye, to the masks, and to the L.A. lights receding in the distance. "There goes our brush with Hollywood."

"Think Jack will ever know we're involved?" Marlan asked.

Randi snorted. Eventually, Jack would read about the Mazarin's theft. There was no way they were getting away without him knowing about it. And realizing just how well he'd been snookered.

Still. That didn't answer the other question. "You don't pull a job that depends on someone else's plan unless you're desperate. Why would he hang his people out to dry like that?"

"Greed. What's the rule?"

"If a million's good, ten million's better. Yeah. And you walk if you ever see any hint that I'm starting to think that way."

"Damned straight."

Randi finished the boat ride, half focused on the horizon to keep the sea sickness at bay. The other half, wondering how she'd know where the line was, the one she needed to see half a dozen steps before she went and did something stupid.

Ode To Uninterrupted Time - A Silly Little Story by M. K. Dreysen

I got bit by the silly bug, dear reader. This week's free story is an...

Ode to Uninterrupted Time - a story for anyone who's ever had to wait for an essential delivery that never seems to happen by M. K. Dreysen

let the void play, with heat and light and possibility... hear the fluctuations, the cascade of infinities run free merge cancel and return to nothingness...

(EXCUSE ME: WE NOTICED YOUR RECENT ORDER FOR A SLOW-WAVE SPACE MODULATION UNIT. SOME OF OUR CUSTOMERS HAVE HAD GREAT SUCCESS WITH AN ALTERNATE PRODUCT, THE EXPLOSIVE SPACE MODULATOR. WE THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO GIVE THIS A LOOK BEFORE WE RUN OUT!)

light comes, true heat now migrates out, a wavefront of reality is expanding through that which cannot will not does not...

(SORRY TO INTERRUPT: FOR A SHORT TIME, WE ARE OFFERING A DISCOUNT TO OUR EXCLUSIVE CUSTOMERS. EXPLOSIVE SPACE MODULATORS AVAILABLE AT FIVE PERCENT OFF, HURRY WHILE SUPPLIES LAST!)

and now particles; mass; pressure; force...

(ABOUT YOUR ORDER: YOUR RECENT ORDER OF SLOW-WAVE PROGRESSIVE SPACE MODULATOR MAY BE DELAYED DUE TO UNFORTUNATE SHIPPING DELAYS; SORRY ABOUT THAT, WE'RE SWAMPED! HAVE YOU CONSIDERED AN ALTERNATIVE, WE CAN HAVE AN EXPLOSIVE SPACE MODULATOR TO YOUR DOOR WITH NO DELAY!)

ah, and now the protons appear, the electrons have found their partners as all things merge in the dance; soon enough, protons hydrogen helium and the smell of lithium burning...

(UPDATE ON YOUR ORDER: WE APOLOGIZE AGAIN FOR THE MINOR DELAY IN DELIVERING YOUR SLOW-WAVE MODULATOR; WE CAN OFFER AN ADDITIONAL DISCOUNT, TWO PERCENT OFF AND YOU'LL GET THE EXPLOSIVE MODULATOR ASAP! THIS IS A GREAT ALTERNATIVE, ESPECIALLY IF YOUR PROJECT IS TIME SENSITIVE!)

the iron sequence is almost finished; the first blush of stars expand and seed, and the next generation appear...

(UPDATE ON YOUR ORDER: OUR SUPPLIER FOR SLOW-WAVE SPACE MODULATORS APPEARS TO BE HAVING AN ISSUE. ARE YOU SURE WE CAN'T INTEREST YOU IN THE ALTERNATIVE SO MANY OF OUR OTHER CUSTOMERS HAVE FOUND SUCCESS WITH, THE EXPLOSIVE SPACE MODULATOR?)

oh and now something new has arrived; planets coalesce from the disks. the stars contain multitudes. and ever so faint whispers of...

(UNFORTUNATELY, IT SEEMS WE'RE GOING TO HAVE TO PUT YOUR ORDER FOR SLOW-WAVE SPACE MODULATORS ON BACK ORDER. AT THIS TIME, WE DO NOT HAVE AN ANTICIPATED SHIPPING DATE. UNLESS WE HEAR OTHERWISE FROM YOU, WE'LL TREAT YOUR PREVIOUS PAYMENT AS A DEPOSIT ON THE SLOW-WAVE MODULATORS; DO BE AWARE THAT COSTS MAY CHANGE UNAVOIDABLY IN THE FUTURE.)

oh, those are definitely no longer whispers; life moves at its own pace, movement becomes breath and breath becomes shouts, voices raised...

(THE SLOW-WAVE SPACE MODULATOR IS STILL ON BACK ORDER. EXPLOSIVE SPACE MODULATORS ARE GOING FAST, YOU SHOULD STOCK UP NOW BEFORE THEY'RE ALL GONE!)

life shouts and it shits its pants. oy. hey, shouldn't you guys have fixed your back-order problems by now?

(AH, ABOUT THAT. THE SLOW-WAVE MODULATORS ARE NO LONGER BEING MANUFACTURED.)

uh-huh. you couldn't have admitted that a few billion years ago?

(WE'RE JUST THE DISTRIBUTOR. ALL MANUFACTURING QUESTIONS SHOULD BE DIRECTED TO THE SUPPLIER, WOULD YOU LIKE THEIR CONTACT INFORMATION?)

i'm beginning to suspect that supplier and i have history... never mind.

(GLAD TO HELP. IF YOU GET A CHANCE, WOULD YOU MIND LEAVING A REVIEW?)

what the hell are they doing now? you turn your back for five minutes, and look. it's like the original expansion, in miniature.

(HEY, JUST WANTED TO LET YOU KNOW ABOUT A FANTASTIC DEAL! EXPLOSIVE SPACE MODULATORS ON SALE, FOR A SHORT TIME ONLY YOU CAN GET THEM FOR TEN PERCENT OFF!)

i've got kind of a mess on my hands here.

(COSMIC SCALE MESSES ARE SO TIRESOME; TRY AN EXPLOSIVE SPACE MODULATOR, OUR OTHER CUSTOMERS WITH SIMILAR ISSUES HAVE REPORTED SUCCESS. AND DON'T FORGET, WE'RE RUNNING THEM AT TEN PERCENT OFF!)

life overcomes, doesn't it? at the rate they're going, the little buggers will expand to fill the universe entire. hmm.

(YES, HOW CAN WE HELP?)

let's talk about those explosive space modulators.

(TEN PERCENT OFF! HURRY AND PLACE YOUR ORDER!)

right, yeah, about that. i think you owe me a little something, remember my original order?

(AH, WE'RE HAVING TROUBLE FINDING ANYTHING LIKE THAT...)

of course you are. i ordered a pallet of slow-wave space modulators from you, and you've spent the past few billion years failing to fill that order. even though i paid for it.

(OH. THAT ORDER. UMMM...)

for a small consideration...

(TWENTY PERCENT?)

hmmm...

(THIRTY?)

done. but they'd better be here on time, and in pristine condition.

(IF THERE'S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THE SHIPMENT, YOU CAN ALWAYS RETURN THEM FOR A FULL REFUND, THOUGH A SMALL RESTOCKING FEE MIGHT APPLY IN CERTAIN INSTANCES.)

drums fingers while watching the life explosion overwhelm the universe.

(UPDATE ON YOUR SHIPPING: THE MANUFACTURER HAS FILLED THE ORDER, IT SHOULD GET TO YOU IN A LITTLE OVER AN EON.)

i could have sworn you guys had promised a little better fulfillment time than that.

(THAT WAS A PROMOTIONAL OFFER AVAILABLE ONLY TO CUSTOMERS WHO SIGNED UP FOR A SUBSCRIPTION TO OUR BUSINESS ELITE BRACKET. WE'RE HAPPY TO DISCUSS AN UPGRADE IN YOUR SERVICE IF YOU WANT. THE REWARDS PROGRAM FOR OUR BUSINESS ELITE CUSTOMERS IS SOMETHING TO BEHOLD.)

not interested. look, is that delivery date real?

(ABSOLUTELY.)

grumbles about the mess life is leaving behind it. though they are entertaining. if small, some of the details are a little hard to pick out, without causing perturbations anyway. which would interfere with the point of the whole thing... hey, when's that order getting here?

(TRACKING INDICATES YOUR DELIVERY IS IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD NOW.)

ok, got it. who the hell packs these things, anyway? what'd you do, run it over with a forklift?

(FOR THIS ORDER, THE MANUFACTURER AND SHIPPER ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR ALL CONDITION ISSUES, HERE'S THEIR CONTACT INFO IF YOU HAVE ANY PROBLEMS OR CONCERNS.)

damn, so what do you guys take responsibility for, anyway? goes out to hide explosive space modulators throughout the knowable universe, in easy-to-find places. comes back to watch the inevitable finale. i'm thinking, before i start the next one, that i'll have to build my own slow-wave modulators. good suppliers being in short supply these days...

(HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THE NEW READY-MADE UNIVERSE? JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING YOU COULD EVER DO, AND WITHOUT ALL THE MUSS AND FUSS OF BUILDING IT YOURSELF!)

oh really? hmm... since you had such a hard time fulfilling your last order for me, what makes you think i would bet on this one?

(FIFTY PERCENT OFF?)

i'll have to think about it.

(SIXTY?)

keep talking...

Stuff I've Been Enjoying 8-9-2020

The World of the Five Gods, by Lois McMaster Bujold

Damnit, Bujold ambushed me. There I was, minding my own busines, finishing up L. E. Modesitt's Corean Chronicles, when the handy little "You might be interested in this..." algorithm threw The Physicians of Vilnoc at me.

Ah-hah, says I. I've been reading fantasy series for a little while now, I know better than to fall for that.

What's the first book in the series? Penric's Demon? Hmm...

Reader, I looked up a few days later and I'd read all of them. 8 novellas, three longer novels. I stopped myself when I then went on and bought the first book in The Sharing Knife.

After I read it, of course. But nope, says I, I won't fall for that one again. Nope, I'm stronger than that, I'll save myself from Bujold's wicked powers this time, I'll put the rest of the Sharing Knife on hold, I will. Save it up, like the next bin of ice cream in the deep freeze.

I just need to clear my head, really. Read some short stories. A couple of other novels by other authors that have been waiting in my queue. Maybe I'll get lucky and they'll be standalones...

I didn't get very far, reader, before I got ambushed by another series. But that's a story for a later date. For now, I tip my hat to Lois McMaster Bujold and say thank you for hauling me back into a stretch of reading two and three books a day for a while.

Mixed; Seperated - A Story Of The Long Run And How You Get There by M. K. Dreysen

So, if you've been following along these past few weeks in my free stories, it appears that I might have had something on my mind.

Let me back up. The stories you've been reading are 'from the vault' in some sense; the one I'm posting today was actually written in October of last year. For me, this means I've regularly got a bit of textual spelunking going on: I'm revisiting where I was at a given time in the not-too distant past.

So the weekly story publishing routine has its benefits, in that I am much more readily able to just put 'em up and send 'em out. And the side benefit that I get to scratch my head and wonder 'Now what on earth was I on about this time?' on the regular.

And? That's a long-winded way of saying that for this week's free story I've got another one that deals with... those moments when you realize that Somebody has been Up To Something. Somebody not of your little world, though they are the Somebodies who might well derail your world if They Get Away With It.

Are there right or wrong answers to the question of What Do I Do? when the powers that be shit their bed? I don't know.

But I do know this dear reader: Althea Aimtree, whom you're getting ready to meet, has put in the work. She's put in the time, the energy, the love. And Althea Aimtree has reached that point in the life, reader, where it's time to ask herself... What do I do about it?

Mixed; Separated - a story of the long run and how you get there by M. K. Dreysen

"You need to be careful with this," Glen told me. "Bring it back in the same envelope."

This was, as indicated, a manila envelope. Spindled folded mutilated in that most delightful United States Postal Service way. "Glen, look at it. It's ready to fall apart now. After I spend a few hours with it..."

He chuckled. "Stan's worried. I told him I'd have it back before the new year, Althea. Giving it back in the original envelope just adds that little touch that means so much."

All this for a handful of newspapers. If Stan was worried enough to be treating this pile of ancient newsprint as a state secret... why'd he send it through the mail, then?

Other than the fact that, if the postmark was correct, Stan lived in Oregon these days. So driving to Amarillo for the ninety-year-old probably wasn't in the cards. "I'll take care of it, Glen, I promise."

He started his truck. "I appreciate it. Tomorrow, by dinner, you'll be done with it, right? And if you make copies, don't do it on the company scanner, ok?"

"Damn, Glen, what the hell did Stan give you?"

"Just read it, Althea. And take plenty of notes." He closed the window, waved, and headed out into the evening traffic.

It was the last time I saw Glen Treadle alive. But before I found out that he'd left to meet his death, I went up to my hotel room for a night of 'light' reading. And note-taking.

A normal plant trip, that's all it was. Glen had retired six months prior; bass fishing, hiking, quail hunting with the Lab that was his constant companion. That's what I'd figured he'd have on his schedule. Nothing much to do with us, his old employer.

Rick, my boss and Glen's, had kept him on the string. "A little consulting. Glen managed Amarillo for us for thirty years, Althea."

I'd seconded the ask, when Rick brought it up. Melanie, Glen's successor, she's good people, just young. Ten years from now she's going to be fantastic. My job, and Glen's while he's willing, is strictly backup. History, the little projects here and there that come up.

Which is where the pile of old newspapers came in. Stan wasn't our old plant manager. He used to work for ShadowStream Aggregate, our back fence neighbor. And the ones who own the property our own plant sits on.

We'd leased it from them, back in the foregone days, long before Glen's time. He'd put together a bible on them; thirty years and a hell of a lot of wrangling with the landlord over whether we'd met our lease terms will do that to a person. Stan's newspaper articles were, well, apocrypha, if you will. Additions to Glen's bible he'd never been able to quite lay his hands on, when he was an official Metrix employee.

Now, well, he's a consulting engineer. A private hand, digging for work. It's a story, good enough to get a few pieces of the story Glen had never quite been able to find.

If only it had made any sense to me, that night. I doubt I'd have twigged enough to save Glen.

But I can wish. Can't I?

ShadowStream started out in ye olden days as a rock and gravel outfit in Wyoming. Anywhere you needed gravel, rock, sand, they'd be there for you. Concrete plants and road work, they trucked their window-breaking stuff pretty much anywhere.

Our wheezing at the seams plant sits next to one of their old gravel pits. Buried in our lease agreement is a paragraph that's always worried me. Boiled down, that paragraph says that we're allowed to send our waste to that pit. With proper notification blah blah blah.

We've never used that 'option'. Glen had pointed it out to me, six years ago when I first started with the company and started coming out here to work projects for him. "Althea, Matt and Theo," the two plant managers who'd held the reins prior to Glen, "Never fell for that bait. And I'm not about to start. Do you know why?"

"Anything we send down there, and all of a sudden, who's holding the liability bag for the whole pit?"

"Damned right." Glen had made sure to tell Melanie that, and I'd reminded her of it.

No. I'd reminded the lawyers of it, using Melanie as a convenient excuse. "Liability we don't have, don't want, can't use. No thank you."

Fortunately, our corporate lawyers are scared of their own shadows. "High risk" and "unknown liability" are terms of power with Renata and Len. Rennie shut down even the thought of it. "Whatever you need, Althea, anyone asks and you send them straight to me. No way in hell are we letting the company get involved with that pit."

ShadowStream wasn't the original company. Which was a surprise. That was the first thing I found sifting through Stan's newspaper clippings. "Three Wyoming Companies To Form New Venture: ShadowStream Aggregate" the headline read.

Since Stan had gone through the work of putting his stories in some kind of order, I figured I might as well respect that. The formation of the conglomerate was the first story at the top, dated October 18, 1941. I didn't know what paper, or where in Wyoming; Stan's razor had taken that information with it. The paper had to be local. Given the way the reporter discussed the companies involved.

"Wyoming sand, gravel, and rock mining has grown by leaps and bounds," the writer told me across the decades. The bottom line, which he didn't make me work very hard to get to, was that the smaller companies saw an opportunity. "'Cooperation, given the current climate, means that we'll all be in a position to do business on a scale that none of our individual endeavors would have been able to reach', Stanley Brent, Sr. told this reporter. The other plant managers echoed his sentiments. Your correspondent believes that the European war's rumblings have made themselves felt even in our own quiet neck of the woods, though none of the plant managers would, on the record, confirm that suspicion."

On the record. I snorted at that. Whoever the reporter had been, he'd come as close as screaming what Stan's father and the others had been happy to tell him at the bar the night before he'd filed his story. But ok, so what? Who in October 1941 would have been shocked that industrial operations were moving to a war footing?

And especially, who would care now, going on eighty years later? You had to cheer on people who had the good sense to know what was likely coming down the pike. Sure, there are still a few people tilting at the windmill of "Roosevelt Knew!", but aside from the fever swamps of the internet, who cares?

The other news articles covered the war effort, and ShadowStream's part in it. Big jobs, trucks going off all over the country. Alaska, even. Exactly the kind of thing you'd expect.

The 1946 article was the last of them. That one, I expected to be a story of the end of the boom, right? The peace dividend, written in pink slips. Except it wasn't. "ShadowStream has their biggest month to date; Trucks coming in from Washington State, New Mexico, and Tennessee, every day of the week and twice on Sundays."

Ok, so they were still big business, right? And, buried down in the article: "Many of the trucks come in loaded with clay. The truckers change trailers and haul gravel back to the origin." Clay, ok, but the reporter, bird dog that he'd been over four years, never said word boo about the purpose of the clay.

Clay, we kind of have a personal interest in. We make bricks. And cement blocks, all kinds of pre-cast stonework. You're probably sitting between walls Metrix has had a brick or twenty involved in. So I figured, hey, maybe what Stan's telling me and Glen is that ShadowStream's postwar clay bonanza found its way to our plant.

Our founder started out as a bricklayer; by the time he got through the Depression, he'd bought himself a plant. That's why the Amarillo plant is a museum piece. None of old man Lebar's kids want to be the ones to shut down their grandpa's startup.

Nor do they want to break open the checkbook and modernize the dinosaur. So here we are.

"Ok, Stan, so the old man made a penny or three running cheap clay leftovers through his kilns. What's the issue?" The paper clippings sat there, giving me no more answers than what they'd already provided.

Screw it, said I, and went to bed. Melanie and I had a long day planned.

The kilns, the robots loading pallets, the operators making sure it all came together. Batch mixers, and yes they were weighing their measures this time, Glen had let the millwrights bulldoze him for too long with "When it looks right" as their method.

"I'm working on that," Melanie said, and she had.

We were sitting in her office, planning dinner and letting her maintenance supervisor, Israel Gutierrez, tell us his laundry list of complaints about the forklifts they'd been forced to lease, rather than buy. And isn't that a whole 'nother story, but it's when I tune Israel's pleas out that I remember.

"Hey, Melanie, wasn't Glen supposed to be here, right after lunch?" And, like a good girl, I had my manila envelope sitting right there in my backpack, ready to go. Me and my little spy mission, I'd photographed every page, feeling like a junior CIA agent only very much happier with a cell phone camera than what the Cold War microfilm cameras could have done.

"Yeah," Melanie replied. "I asked him if he wanted to join us at Alphie's for lunch, he said he'd be here by one so he could claim his history lesson from you."

"I'll call him." And that's when the ball started rolling. No answer, so ok "I'll drop it off on my way to the hotel room. The Canadian River Cafe for dinner, Mel?"

Glen's truck sat in his driveway. The dog, Lizz, started barking at me as soon as I got out of the car. But neither the "Hey you, I know you" or the "Holy shit it's a stranger" bark. Lizz and I were buddies, she knew me. Well enough to whine, between barks.

911 isn't as far away as it used to be. The cops showed up for a welfare check.

We spotted him, well, his boot, through the bedroom window. I kept Lizz company, and out of the way, while the cops did their thing. "Ambulance needed," and immediately after, "Crime Scene Unit."

They wouldn't let me get close, neither the cops nor the dog. Lizz howled whenever I tried to leave her, or get too close to Glen's body. The best I could do was his office across the hall. Lizz sat at the end of the hall in the living room, whining, crying, then squirmed down the hall on her belly.

I patted her, tried my best to comfort her, while I scanned the stuff Glen had laid out on his desk. Printouts, of reports and letters he'd scanned from the plant archives. All of it echoes, in our own Metrix idiom, of the ShadowStream articles.

Most of it I'd seen before, when Glen had asked me to learn the history. "Most of this won't matter, day to day. But when you do need it, you'll need it bad, Althea. Read it now when nothing's hanging on it."

I'd been primed, I guess. The invoice, for twenty four tons of clay, from ShadowStream, a hundred dollars delivered to our plant, sat off to the side. Almost buried.

Almost. I wonder if Glen arranged it that way before or after he'd been shot. Lizz couldn't answer for him. I pulled out the phone and made two phone calls. The first, to Melanie.

The second, to Stan. I made that one from Glen's back porch. "What's so special about the clay, Stan?"

"What were those states again, Althea? And what year was it?"

1946. New Mexico. Tennessee. Washington State. The penny dropped. "Oh, sweet ever-loving mother of God."

"Stop there. Now you know what you're looking for. Glen's dead, you say?"

"Yeah."

"Call me when you find out the arrangements. I'm not much of a traveling man these days, so I'll have to send flowers."

"Thank you, Stan."

The cops made me wait. At least they let me keep Lizz occupied in the back yard. Melanie arrived about the time the EMT's loaded Glen into the ambulance.

"I let Rick know," she told me. "The company's taking care of it. Charlotte and the kids, all that."

Glen's wife had moved on years ago, before I'd started. "She's in Arizona?"

"Tempe. The girls all went to ASU."

Melanie had spent the last couple years as Glen's sidekick, second in command. Me, there's a limit to what I'll ask about the personal side of life. Then, my job I don't spend eight hours a day every day with anybody. "I need to get into the office, Melanie."

"You've got keys, right?" She didn't even ask why. Faith, I guessed.

Yeah, I had keys. Plant's 24/7, most of it, but the office locks up. Glen had given me a set of keys after about the fourth time he'd had to come back and lock the place behind me. I have trouble working in hotel rooms.

I stopped at the lab, first. For one of the Geiger counters Marty kept on hand.

Why a lab, for a brickworks? Self defense. Glen's predecessor had picked up a couple of contracts, years ago, that made him test the materials. Expensively test his materials. So, "Cheaper in the long run to do it in house" and a plant manager who'd started out as a geologist resulted in a lab on-site.

The Geiger counter, well mostly that was Marty's little party gag. Turn the gain up, way past Ridiculous and all the way to Are You Kidding Me? levels, and the fool thing clicks enough so you'd think you were in the middle of a fifties scifi movie. Marty, our chemist, uses it to scare the new techs. Crank up the sensitivity, turn them loose on the piles of new-mined sand or gravel, and watch them come running for a lesson in orders of magnitude.

We keep displays of our products in the offices. Not sales displays, it's no showroom. Just, everywhere you go, on bookshelves, as paperweights, there's always a brick or two at hand. Glen's office, Melanie's now, the conference room, they're almost museums.

Ted Lebard's monument sat square in the little foyer, an intersection between the two hallways defining our little offices. Melanie's door on the left, the conference room on the right, front end behind and the maintenance shop ahead.

And the first stack of bricks the place had made sitting right there in the middle. Well, first load of a paid order, anyway. Nobody in a brick yard counts the broken ones, the test runs. The old man hadn't hung the first dollar up, or an invoice or anything like that. No, he'd put the first pile of good paid-fors together for us all to stumble over.

I checked the counter's gain when it started clicking. No, I hadn't left it turned up to eleven. Almost eighty years later, and the bricks were still just a little hot. "What's a little radioactivity between friends?" I asked.

"Far too much for you to be involved with," said a voice from behind me.

Not a voice I recognized. Good, I told myself. At least he's not Melanie. Or anyone else from the company. I set the Geiger counter on the bricks, then turned, slowly.

The guy stood in the hallway. He'd come in the front door, same as I had. Blue jeans, dark blue windbreaker. Gun, pointed my way.

He was about ten, fifteen feet away, give or take. Close enough for the brick I sent as hard as any bowling ball I'd ever thrown.

My little passion; 204 average, there's an alley within easy driving distance of all of our plants. I may not get to the gym, but I can always find a couple hours to throw a few frames.

Funny little thing, especially for a woman: bowlers don't have an overhand windup, so the guy didn't react until it was too late. The brick hit him dead on in the center of his face.

I don't remember the gun going off, then, but it must have. Melanie found two bullet holes, later, in her office door. Just like I hadn't stopped to banter with the guy or ask why, I grabbed another brick from Lebard's monument and sent it down the lane, before he could shake off the pain of his broken face.

This one he saw coming, I guess. He turned his head, so the brick hit him in the temple. He went down like a poleaxed cow. I ran up, a brick in each hand, kicked the gun somewhere off as far as I could send it.

Somehow or another, I managed not to use the bricks in my hands to finish bashing the guy's head in. I backed off, to the brick pile to set one of them down and pull out my phone. While I talked to the 911 operator, I hunted for the gun. I kicked it over to the pile. Sure, I could have picked it up; maybe I thought I needed to keep my fingerprints clear of it.

Or maybe I just felt more secure, there and in that moment, with a brick in my hand.

"Jesus, you killed him," the first cop said, when she got there. She'd been at Glen's house, second or third car that got there. The 911 operator had recognized my voice, too, so I'd been able to give them the story before the nervous firepower showed up.

He'd quit breathing, but I didn't know it until the lady in blue took her hand away from checking his pulse. "His gun's over here, behind me."

"You're going to put down the brick, now, and step over to that door, ok? And you're going to stay right there, with your hands up where I can see them, while I find this gun. Right, ma'am?"

"You just let me know when you want me to start." I don't really know how long it took for Officer Radovich and I to work out what she needed to feel safe and secure just then.

I do remember it seemed like the earth and the stars would finish with their business before we did.

And I can promise you, the only benefit to being the principle witness to two murder scenes in one day is that, in my case, there was really only one, very long, story to tell. My saving grace was the gun. The detective read his version of the scene right from the walkthrough; he didn't have any doubts what the lab would tell him. "I hope Metrix is happy picking up your hotel tab for a while, Miss Aimtree. You're going to be our guest here in Amarillo for a couple weeks."

"In this case, Detective Tremont, I'm willing to put up with the complaints from corporate."

Melanie took me to the gravel pit the next morning. I caught her up on Glen's suspicions, and how they'd become reality the night before, while we bounced over cattle guard and caliche. She let me talk through it uninterrupted until we pulled up to the lookout.

"You believe that's the heart of it, don't you?" she asked.

The heart of it: two hundred acres or so of open water hiding a secret. The water, seventy years of steady trickling runoff into the old gravel pit. The surface of it lay fifty feet or so below the little ridge Melanie's truck sat on. "Kids in town still sneak out here to skinny dip," Melanie said.

I believed it. Hell, that age, I'd lived it, though our gravel pit out by Alexandria had been in the middle of an abandoned army base. We'd had oak trees to tie ropes to, you swung out over the edge and held your breath for the interminable drop to the water. Or, you screamed until you hit the water.

August, a hundred degrees, it didn't matter, our pit had been a hundred feet deep and the water held that icy depth through the worst of the heat.

Here, scrub cedar and mesquite did their best, a few willows and scrub oak fought the good fight, but none of them seemed to have made for a decent swing. I climbed down from the cab and walked to the edge. "I guess they don't need a swing, do they?"

"Nope," Melanie answered. "Just a good head of steam and a little lack of sense. Or a lot."

The road cut around the top of the pit; here though, a couple generations of teenagers, and observers like us, had cut the path to the miniature El Capitan that we stood on. A little nose of rock, clear and high out over the water; I heard the screams of joy, whispering out from the rocks.

Over to the left, those same kids, and likely more than a few adults, had cut a path, one muddy foot at a time, from the bare little gravel beach surviving by a thread at the water, to where I stood at the top. Erosion by drip and bare foot and more than a little piss, if the empty beer cans hiding in the scrub were any indication.

I took in the lake view. As best I could tell, this was the only clear area on the entirety of the bank. Every other square foot, the willows and the oaks were doing their work, sending their roots down for the precious water. It told me that the place was a secret, or at least, not something the whole world knew about.

Here was a boat launch, a place to get shitfaced and stupid or screw your boyfriend under the stars. And if you kept it to yourself, ShadowStream wouldn't get antsy enough to lock the gates and start a range war with the local punk brigade.

I turned, enough to get my bearings. Our plant lay a half mile or so behind me, south and downhill a couple hundred feet to the highway grade. And west, more visible because of their cement plant furnace plume than anything else, was the ShadowStream operation.

"Are they still pumping their current pits to here?" I asked. Hazard of running a pit mine. Even here, dry as it was, a couple inches of rain would put ten inches of water in the bottom of their working pits. Thus, this one, catch all for more than just the natural drainage.

"Story claims they've got Pit Twelve permitted to start whenever they need. They had it approved in 2009, if I remember right. But the drought put the need for it off a few years."

Evaporation, and nothing to replace it. "How many feet are they supposed to leave for freeboard?"

"Originally, it was supposed to be twenty. But that slide," the access ramp cut into the bank, "That has everyone happy to let it stay at fifty or so. I expect, if we have a good winter and a couple of heavy snow storms, they'll put Twelve into operation next year. That's the noise they've been making, anyway." Melanie met with the ShadowStream plant managers every couple of months; she was on their mailing list for the environmental conversations, at least the ones that the permitting authorities were involved with, as well.

That was the history of it, and the view. Since I'd made such a big deal of the fact that we weren't ever going to use the pit for disposing any of our garbage, I'd also made visiting the place a part of my regular schedule. So we didn't get any surprises. I had a couple of additional purposes this time.

The first one was easy enough. I'd brought the Geiger counter with me. Not that I expected much, and the counter didn't surprise me. "Too much water, too much wind and time." I slid down to the water, just to be certain.

Melanie waited until I'd moved away from the bottom of the slide to follow me. I appreciated that, since it meant I didn't have the sand and gravel she stirred up coming down around me. "You expected something more dramatic?"

"Not really. That much water covers a lot of sins." But the counter wasn't my real weapon. That was the packet of quart sample bottles, half a dozen pristine plastic screwtop lab bottles sitting in my backpack. "On the other hand, water reveals more than it conceals, if you know how to ask it."

And Marty was very, very good at asking the kind of questions I needed the answers to.

Melanie's phone started ringing as soon as we climbed back into the truck. While she answered it, I labeled my samples.

"Althea," she said. "It's for you."

Which explained the phone that had suddenly come into view. The screen had gone dark, so I had no idea who was on the other end. "Yeah?"

"Miss Aimtree, we finally get to speak to you. Did last night's events leave an impression on you?"

More than a few. "If there's a message there, I'm afraid it's a little obscure."

"Keep testing the boundaries, Miss Aimtree, and I'd be astonished if you didn't find a much greater degree of clarity."

In other words, they'd be more than willing to send enough killers to find the one that got it right. I felt a chill, brief cold seizing my nerves. I'd jumped into a lake I never knew existed. "And, so?"

"I'd also be astonished if your handheld counter showed you anything actionable. It's a funny thing, isn't it?"

Yeah. Half-lives march along without care; the Geiger counter had been noisy, but the absolute levels in Lebard's Pile weren't enough, now, to cause more than an eight-day sensation. A house's worth of the bricks would amount to a daily exposure on the level of a dental assistant.

I'd done the math. Even back when the bricks had been made, the radiation levels would have been nervewracking, but on the order of living above seven thousand feet. Not even Three Mile Island. My best guess? The clays had been runoff from a mining operation, some uranium source where they'd been in a hurry and didn't have the time to put in a proper sluice pit.

Truck it somewhere else, and hope. And we, Ted Lebard at least, had grabbed a discount without asking too many questions.

The guy on the other end of the phone, and I could assume he was watching us from the ShadowStream plant barely visible through the scrub, was daring us to sue him. Sue him and lose.

"I believe there are seventy-three souls working for Metrix Amarillo, yes?" the guy continued. "Most of them have what, twenty years in?"

Seventy eight, asshole, I didn't say. And yeah. A couple more years and Israel would make fifty; he'd started loading bricks when he was sixteen. "You expect me to just let you..."

"I expect you to consider where you're going to employ a good crew who've made their lives around this out-of-date plant. That is your company's reputation, after all."

Boy howdy. Our Detroit plant had burned down, back in the eighties. Took a little more than a year to rebuild.

The owners didn't lay a single soul off. Every one of the Detroit crew got paid for their forty, every week, and they started back up as soon as the kilns lit up. We looked after our people. And asshole knew it.

Knew there wasn't any current risk, either. "So long as no one in your organization is foolish enough to go swimming in lakes that belong to others, Miss Aimtree. Or any other water-related activities."

Huh. It sounded like the view from the ShadowStream plant didn't include the water's surface, not the part we could access. I wonder if the smug bastard even knew of the kids who'd made stories here. I looked at the sample bottles between my feet, then back to Melanie.

She had a lot of people depending on her. I had suspicions and allegations that, at best, added up to a nuisance. Even a brand-new public health crusader would be hard-pressed to tackle this one.

"Another parameter for your mental calculations, Miss Aimtree. Federal agencies take some matters very seriously. Relationships of accord have a tendency to evolve and grow close over decades."

Another brick, excuse me, of shit to worry over. In other words, at least one branch of the alphabets would be happy to stomp on us and make it all go away. "There's an implied level of reciprocity on your part. Considering some of the risks, how am I to believe you speak for so many unknown participants? You're just someone on the other end of a phone call."

"Just so, Miss Aimtree. Our company's long term interests here are, shall we say, best served by keeping our heads down and insuring that we are good citizens to all interested observers. Your own similar approach will, all things considered, suit admirably."

I stared out at the water; several hundred million gallons called burying the past. "I... just remember your part in this."

The guy chuckled, and let the line go dead.

What the hell had I done? What could I do?

****

Some years later, an older woman, dressed similarly enough to campus casual for most of those who saw her to assume she was a professor, made her way to a cubbyhole of an office in Stanford's engineering department.

"Ah, Miss Aimtree, welcome." Professor Heizen gestured at the stacks of books and papers filling the office. "I apologize for the mess. Do please come in." Professor Heizen's specialty, the environmental legacy of the early atomic weapons projects, was most evident from the book titles, and the ancient blueprints peaking out of the piles.

"Unresolved Issues at the Hanford Site". "Projecting The Church Rock Aquifer Evolution". Althea read the titles, with Heizen's name tastefully lined up in the author's positions, and hoped she'd picked the right place.

The two women were, as near as made no difference, of similar age, and demeanor. Passers-by would have assumed they were colleagues, chatting over the coming semester's duties. "Thank you for taking the time to meet with me, Professor. You're the reason I've come to Stanford."

"Of course, of course." The professor took the compliment in stride, as only her due. "Now, Miss Aimtree, I understand you've chosen to pursue a Ph.D. as part of your retirement. A hobby? I'll warn you, in my experience, those without a passion have a much harder time finishing their dissertation."

Althea smiled, remembering a conversation on a cell phone and the bitter taste in her mouth that had followed it. "I have a story you might appreciate, Professor. It all started about twenty years ago. I'd flown out to our Amarillo plant for one of my regular site visits..."