The First Love Of Alipang Havens

In exterior appearance, the Orbital Palace had the basic hub-and-wheel design which had long been anticipated for space stations. All decoration was on the inside, where guests would actually see the Chinese murals and sculptures during their stay. The full benefit of rotational gravity was to be felt in the wheel, with "down" being oriented exactly opposite from the way it was on any planet: that is, "down" was away from the center. The axis of the station's hub was in empty air, a great central atrium being reserved to offer the fun of soaring in weightlessness. That central atrium was also used periodically as the three-dimensional stage for zero-gravity dance performances as part of the hotel's entertainment.

It had of course been a triumph of technology to position the Orbital Palace in the ideal orbit, give it the exact rotation rate for a maximum gravity almost equal to that on the Moon, and so on. But another delicate balancing of forces took place inside the arrivals concourse, very shortly after the Brazilian spacecraft had docked and let off its passengers.

Carlota Ruiz and Samantha Ford stood staring at each other, while Nalani Hahona and Cassandra Jefferson also stood staring at each other. Carlota and Nalani had arrived on a Chinese spacecraft scarcely an hour earlier, having for their part come up from Beijing. Samantha and Carlota were essentially identical to each other in height and mass, while Cassandra and Nalani were both about three centimeters taller than the other two, thus also alike in size to each other. All four women were fairly close to each other in age. The gravitational balance shifted a bit, so that Cassandra and Carlota stared at each other, while Samantha and Nalani stared at each other. The one artistic asymmetry in this tableau was that Cassandra up to now had not known any of the other three women personally except Samantha, while the other three women all knew each other all around. This led to Cassandra shifting her gaze to Samantha, who looked at her in turn; and as if in choreography, Carlota and Nalani also looked at each other.

Seeing that Cassandra wanted her to take initiative, Samantha spoke: "Carlota, Nalani, this is Cassandra Jefferson. Nalani, thank you for arranging for Cassandra to take over for you on my staff; she's worked out fine." The ice thus was broken painlessly. Cassandra shook hands with Carlota while Samantha and Nalani air-kissed; then Cassandra shook hands with Nalani while Samantha and Carlota air-kissed.

"What brings you two here?" Carlota asked.

"I'm assigned to negotiate with Hsing Ti-Lao," replied Samantha, referring to the representative of the Lunar colony. This caused Carlota's eyebrows to shoot up, and the Diversity States Ambassador to the United Nations spoke in a voice which was like a shout with the volume turned way down:

"Say what?? You can't have been assigned for that! I've been assigned for that! I'm the one who's already well-known in China!"

"But I'm the one who's supposed to handle special one-time jobs like this!" retorted Samantha. "Who gave you the assignment?"

"Meg did." Carlota relished being able to show off the fact that she was on a first-name basis with Secretary of State Megavolt Atkinson. Carlota had been Ms. Atkinson's personal secretary just before being Samantha's.

Considering herself to be holding the trump card, Samantha countered: "But Jessica gave it to me!" --though Samantha was not really on a first-name basis with President Trevette.

Carlota's expression showed that Samantha had scored a point; but she wasn't finished yet. "But Nalani and I got here first, and Dr. Hsing has already greeted us! Changing her expectations of whom she is to talk to would make us all look like amateurs!"

Cassandra grabbed at a chance to be the voice of reason. "We need to make an encrypted call back to Washington to straighten this out. While we wait for the clarification, Samantha as well as Carlota could converse informally with Dr. Hsing; just postpone saying anything official until we know what's what. You can say truthfully enough that I'm brand-new in space, and still adjusting."

Nalani, the Hawaiian, seemed willing to cooperate with this intramural diplomatic solution. "Carlota, that sounds like the best plan. We're all on the same team. And if there's a need to fill in idle time for us assistants, I'll gladly show Cassandra around the station."
 
I hope something convinces Reltseotu to change her mind.
Two people assigned to the same job? Somebody didn't communicate very well!
 
At age 41, Hsing Ti-Lao, M.D. was older than any of the four female bureaucrats who had come to see her on behalf of the D.S.A., but still very fit, fitter than many women half her age. Thanks to the Chinese espionage network, she had known about the contradictory orders before the American women had known; but at her first encounter with Samantha Ford, in the presence of Carlota Ruiz, she gave no sign of knowing that there even WAS any mixup. (This was after the two ambassadors had transmitted their request for a definite word on who was in charge.) The three women met in a conference room on the rim of the space station. The window, polarized to limit how much sunlight could get in, gave a view of space--but not a very good view of either the Earth or the Moon, both of which would have been fully visible by turns if the room had had a window in its floor. The floor was comfortably opaque; too many earthbound folks found it unsettling to have the whole universe beneath their feet.

Falling back on her medical profession, Dr. Hsing chatted with both Americans about the kind of subjects which were to be lectured about at the seminar, such as how low gravity affected blood circulation. Neither Ambassador Ruiz nor Ambassador Ford was arguing about precedence in the talks on access to the Lunar colony, so Dr. Hsing did not bring it up either. As far as she knew, Chinese intelligence did not yet know WHY there had been a confusion of assignments; let the ridiculous Americans fumble their way through that. One Western fool was as good to talk with as another.

Meanwhile, Nalani and Cassandra were strolling the outer-middle one of four circular corridors which ran all the way around the wheel of the station: a circumference of over three kilometers. In placement as part of the station design, these corridors were concentric, one within the next; in terms of a person's orientation by the sensation of up and down, one was above the next. When you walked along any of them, you could see the floor curving up ahead of you; but when you reached that next part, it always felt level. Of countless traditional-style Chinese paintings to be seen on the walls, all human beings portrayed were women, with no exceptions. (Next month, an all-male seminar was going to take place, and then it would be all men in the pictures. The Chinese could be most accommodating when it suited them.)

At a refreshment stand, the Hawaiian woman treated the African-American woman to a fruit smoothie, buying one for herself as well. Where they were, there was enough gravity that the act of drinking was no different than on Earth.

"Almost all eating or drinking is done out here on the wheel, where drinks don't have to be sealed inside a squeeze-packet. Within the hub, you soon come to the zero-grav in the center. Floating globules of liquid, and floating morsels of food, may seem fun to play around with for a moment; but the station personnel really don't want them getting into the ventilation system."

"I understand that weightless dancing is done as entertainment in the atrium."

"Yes. A number of school-age girls, trained at a South American school, are on the station right now; on the final night of the seminar, they'll give a performance for us all."

"As for night, I know that their day-cycle here goes by Beijing time; so Samantha and I are going to be hit with some jet lag, whereas you and Ambassador Ruiz are already on the Beijing clock. Can we get a sleep-rhythm treatment here, to sync up with the rest of you?"

Nalani nodded. "Yes, you can; but hang fire on that. It might be ME getting the treatment to sync up with YOU. If you think of Carlota and me as one squad on the team, and you and Samantha as the other squad on the same team, there could be reasons to have someone always awake and alert. We'll have to see what our 'boss ladies' think about who does what." The way she said "boss ladies" made it clear that she considered herself pretty much Carlota's equal, not a hireling. "On a space station, whose own passage through day-side and night-side is entirely OUT of sync with Earth's day, there's always something going on that someone should be paying attention to."

"How many times have you been here before?" asked Cassandra.

For an instant, Nalani wanted to brag; but something about her successor in the job of Samantha's companion made her feel more like telling the truth. "On this space station, only once, and it wasn't a long stay; but I've been on a couple of short-orbit flights besides. Have you NEVER been in space?"

"Not unless the stratosphere counts, on a hypersonic liner. But I have gone on cruises in luxury submarines."

Nalani's look of surprise and interest was not faked. "Really! With lights and camera feeds to see the deep-sea wildlife?"

"Yep; even a giant squid, once."

"How about that? You'd think that as a Hawaiian, I would know all about the ocean, but I don't. I can swim, and that's about it. Tell me more."

They talked more, and enjoyed it more, and talked still more, and enjoyed it still more. By the time they had finished a preliminary tour of the Orbital Palace, Nalani and Cassandra were unanimous in what they wanted to do, and they would make a request accordingly to their respective ambassadors. It seemed likely to them that Washington would have BOTH ambassadors talk with Dr. Hsing, so that it made sense for Ambassadors Ford and Ruiz to be on the same day-cycle. This, in turn, suggested that it would make sense for their two assistants to be on an opposite cycle, able to cover business when the ambassadors were asleep.

There was a room allotted to Carlota and Nalani, and a nearby room allotted to Samantha and Cassandra. The request of the assistants was a switch, with Samantha and Carlota sharing one room, and Cassandra and Nalani sharing the other room. After all, Samantha and Carlota were not strangers to each other, and no animosity remained from any past events....
 
Samantha and Carlota agreed to the exchange of roommates, on the condition that the two secretaries be the ones to stay awake longer beyond the present moment. The two ambassadors expected some time to pass before anything productive could be done, so they wanted to sleep through the idle immediate future.

So Cassandra and Nalani found themselves wandering around the space-hotel again. They had random conversations with seminar attendees from Venezuela, Ireland, Kenya and other countries, but found no one either of them knew, and no one whose company they liked as much as they liked each other's company. Nalani, for her part, was glad that Cassandra had been such a suitable replacement for herself in Samantha's employ, thus assuaging Nalani's conscience (what there was of it) about her sudden quitting as Samantha's assistant. But she realized now that she was pleased to be making Cassandra's acquaintance for Cassandra's own sake.

"Since no international intrigue is going on yet, let's give you a flying lesson!"

Cassandra looked at Nalani with eyebrows raised. "You mean, in the zero-gravity atrium?"

"What else? Neither of us is qualified for vacuum-walking in a spacesuit;" and linking arms with Cassandra, Nalani led the way to an elevator which ran between the "highest" floor of the wheel and the center of the space station.

The Chinese state-owned corporation which operated the Orbital Palace was able to change artwork, but was not about to change its employees around to suit even the most man-hating feminists. Each entrance to the vast padded chamber which was the zero-gravity atrium was guarded by an intimidating male safety guard. The guard the two secretaries encountered was a muscular Asian, square-faced and square-shouldered. He was a bit shorter in stature than the two women meeting him, but broad and hard-muscled enough that he could crush both of them like eggs. Not that there was anything threatening about his manner.

"You ladies will have to wait," he said in good English. "The young entertainers are in the atrium rehearsing, and they must not be interfered with. But you may watch them if you like."

Looking at the man's identity badge, Cassandra saw a name which didn't look Chinese: "Nyunt Zeyar." So she asked, "Excuse me, but are you Malaysian?"

"No, Burmese. Glad to get this job, though; no member of my family even flew in an airplane before me, and here I am in space. It makes good money for my wife and children, and I only have to be away from them about forty percent of the time. That window over there would be a good place to watch the youngsters rehearsing."

Trying not to show their distaste for the traditional patriarchalism Nyunt Zeyar embodied for them, the two women stationed themselves at the indicated observation window, crowding close together so they could both see. (Though there was no atmosphere-containment issue with these interior windows, the amount of inside surface NOT cushioned with padding had to be kept small, for the safety of those at play inside the spacious atrium.)

Cassandra was the first to sight the action within, and nudged her new friend to look in the right direction. From opposite sides of the weightless interior, two girls clad in what looked like sweatsuits, each in the neighborhood of nine years old, were flying straight at each other. When they were about to collide, each twisted her body to the right, advancing her left arm and shoulder, and slapped her hand against the other one's left shoulder. Each applying exactly equal force, each one's flight vector was equally changed, and each flew to a different point on the inner wall than she would have arrived at without the course correction.

Once the children had their feet braced, they took off again: this time, on courses aimed only to pass NEAR each other, not to meet head-on. But they passed close enough that they could just manage to reach toward each other and catch hands, causing them to twirl around each other. Evidently practiced in judging their momentum in zero-gee, they let go of each other before they would have spent all their inertia; otherwise, it would have been the responsibility of Nyunt Zeyar or another of the watchmen to go in and help them out of their becalmed predicament. As it was, the two girls moved slowly, but moved, to drift to the walls again. Being slowed, they did graceful arm movements along the way.

"That looks almost like a hula!" exclaimed Nalani, resting a hand on Cassandra's shoulder, almost imperceptibly in the very low gravity here.

"It reminds me of looking into a handball court," Cassandra replied, casually touching Nalani also in return. "Or like a billiard game, if the billiard balls all propelled themselves." Looking past Nalani at Nyunt Zeyar, she asked him, "Is there any rule against our speaking to those girls when they come out?"

"Not as long as an authorized witness is present," rumbled the Burmese; "and I qualify for that."

"Thank you," Nalani told the guard. Then she turned Cassandra to face her, and smilingly inquired, "Are you going to ask them to coach you on weightless maneuvers?"

Cassandra repaid the smile. "No, I'll trust you to give me the basic training. But at the very least, I want to compliment those kids on their skill, in case there's no chance to talk to them when they and the others have given their public performance a week from now."
 
Anne-Marie Rand, second-born child and first daughter to Summer and Evan Rand, was one of the girls rehearsing in the zero-gee atrium. The other was Jocelyn Finds-the-Horse, an Oglala Sioux Indian whom Anne-Marie had met at a pagan festival in Bolivia. Word had reached Anne-Marie that her brother Michael was free from the commune in whose custody he had been forcibly placed, which made Anne-Marie herself the only one of the Rand offspring NOT yet restored to the family. But the ballet school had set a condition for Anne-Marie's release. Besides the appalling sum of money Dan and Chilena Salisbury had had to hand over as a ransom, the girl was required to take part in ONE prestigious performance for the feminist throng at the Orbital Palace.

Jocelyn was perfectly happy to go on into a space-ballet career; she had bought into all the talk about serving the collective. But Anne-Marie was just going through the motions--if it could be called "just going through the motions" when she was putting a tremendous effort into doing everything right, lest she be accused of not carrying her end of the deal.

When she and Jocelyn finished their practice and flew to one of the exits, a pair of adult women who seemed to be together engaged the schoolgirls in conversation. Jocelyn ate up this attention, but Anne-Marie said only a polite minimum, and got away as soon as she graciously could. She wanted to be with her parents and siblings, not with stuffy rich women who seemed to think they were doing her a favor by smiling about her captivity. She took no interest in seeing what efforts those women made at weightless motion when their turn came in the atrium.

Later, in the children's quarters, one of their adult supervisors, an Andean Indian lady, changed the television channel from the entertainment the kids had been watching, to some boring news channel. But Anne-Marie was taken aback at how suddenly the screen turned into a war zone.

A tree was burning from trunk to top. Two white men were seen firing guns in a location with trees. Armed helicopters flew over trees that seemed an entirely different kind from the trees where the gunmen had been standing.

Anne-Marie was as sure as she could be that the image of the helicopters was purely computer-graphics work. But several video shots of explosions and fires looked genuine. And a group of dead African people, shown lying where they had fallen inside a wrecked house, also seemed real. Through these and other images, a voice was narrating in Chinese. Eventually the owner of the voice was seen onscreen: a woman of mixed race, but not Asian, with an expression of noble and righteous outrage. Her voice was being dubbed into Chinese in real time; but besides a Chinese caption under her face, there was also a name-caption readable to all the English-speaking girls watching: RELTSEOTU SMITH.

The name meant nothing to Anne-Marie; but the chaperone pontificated about the meaning of the broadcast. "Young women, this is a translated live broadcast of 'The Glance.' What they are reporting is terrible news: the white-supremacist fascist Christians in Africa are stepping up their efforts at genocide. Even as we enjoy the pleasures of the Orbital Palace, those bourgeois Nazi racists are busy killing everyone who's different from them. I'm sorry that you have to grow up in such a world; but remember what a difference the performing arts make! Those of you who stand fast in your creative destiny--" (Anne-Marie knew this was a veiled reproach to her for wanting to quit space ballet) "--will have the satisfaction of using fine arts, the arts of the collective, to fight the power...to strike a pirouetting blow against prejudice and hate!"

Anne-Marie endured all this. She would also endure being applauded by a crowd of women who, for all she knew, would all agree that her parents were Nazi racists. God willing, she would soon be free. And when she was with Mom and Dad at last, she would ask THEM to tell her what was the truth behind these media offensives against what she believed in.
 
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Pitchike12 said:
Ammm..I'm sort of wondering if this will continue...:rolleyes:
Click to expand...


If you mean, will I keep on writing about Alipang and his world, yes, God willing, I plan to finish the current story AND write one more after that. If you mean, will characters IN the story continue their lying propaganda against Christians--it goes on in real life, so I illustrate it here.
 
By the way, the character of Anne-Marie Rand is NOT meant to stand for my own real-life daughter Annemarie Ravitts Martinez. Because the characters of Summer and Evan Rand were originally conceived by Nightcrawler_Fan (see the VERY beginning of this thread), I invited N-Fan to name the children Summer and Evan would have. She simply happened to give one daughter the same name as my actual daughter. As the saying goes, art imitates life. :)



You know how the winters arrive and depart;
Each one leaves a bit more old age in my heart.
But rise from your bed, and we'll dance all the same;
The tree of remembrance will tell me your name. ​
 
Chapter 38: The New Texas Two-Step

The coming of October did not release Texas from the threat of severe thunderstorms. These plains could still be raked with lightning just as hard as in summer. Although a degree of weather control was a reality in this decade, it cost plenty of electricity; so human interference only occurred at times and places judged important by the Department of Sustainable Energy, with input from the Departments of Distribution, Transportation and Eco-Sensitive Agriculture.

But today, the Texas Rangers were perfectly happy to have a whopping great storm happening by the plain processes of nature. No spy would pick up any clue of this thunderstorm having been generated for convenience, because it _hadn't_ been generated for convenience--unless it were that God was on the side of the Rangers, which Rangers of course were inclined to believe. In these conditions, two of the renovated Russian Tu-95's could take off from San Antonio on what were supposed to be flights to carry a mix of cargo and government passengers...they could plunge deep into clouds...and they could activate holographic blur-projectors, to reinforce the ability of cloud cover to mask their actions from ground, aerial or satellite observation. Thus, even _before_ beginning to hack the g.p.s. network, the two Texas Bears could conceal the fact that they changed their direction from eastward to northward.

Captaining one plane, and in command of the sortie, was a former U.S. Air Force transport pilot named Colt Finnegan. Captaining the other plane, and keeping in contact via cognitive radio, was a Polish immigrant with experience in his native country's air force, named Stan Lewandowski. Captain Finnegan--reinstated in his old rank--was the only American on this mission who knew that Lewandowski had ties to the covert anti-tyranny force the Poles had put together with Nigerian cooperation. Lewandowski was a personal friend of a certain Colonel Parnescu who was a key man in that small secret army.

One way the secret army had helped this mission was threat assessment. Although Aztlan at its founding had been deprived of guided missiles, the Texas Rangers were now informed by the spy network that China had chosen to look the other way when Venezuela provided some air-to-air missiles to its Aztec-Maoist friends.

Emilio Vasquez, brother-in-law to Alipang Havens, was on Lewandowski's plane. As he was not yet needed to make the plane invisible to global positioning, he came forward to talk with the Polish flyer. When he first put his head into the cockpit, Kathy Templeton, the co-pilot, said to him, "Emilio! The Captain was just wondering about all the nature preserves! You're good at explaining things..."

Nodding, Emilio moved closer to Lewandowski. "Sir, you're aware that the Great Plains Federal District, over which most of our flight path leads, is wider in land area, and more irregular in shape, than most of the other federal districts. After some debate in the Party Presidium, they made Iowa part of Great Plains instead of including it in Midwest, gave it part of Missouri too, and it runs down through Oklahoma. They let it be big and sprawling because overall it's lower in population density than any other district, unless it's the Rocky Mountain District. And they've _kept_ Great Plains low in total population, by creating additional nature preserves, barring them to ALL human use."

The Captain gave Emilio only a brief glance, before turning his eyes back to his controls and indicators. "More so than in the other districts?"

"Yes, though there are preserves elsewhere. They pretend it's from concern for wild animals; but with the way they destroyed so many _domestic_ animals when the regime got started, no one in Texas believes them on that score. What they want is to keep our population concentrated in urban areas as much as is feasible; easier to control them there, keep them dependent. And it's always possible they'll find use for the uninhabited areas."

Lewandowski was quiet for a moment, checking a display to see how much farther they would still be in cloud cover. Then he said softly, "Maybe to create more enclaves for dissidents like your in-laws?"

Emilio's voice was somber. It was the voice of a man whose wife had often wept over the injustice of being prevented from seeing her parents and other loved ones. "That's perfectly possible, though they haven't yet nearly filled the Enclave space they already have. Unless, maybe, other political prisoners are _secretly_ held in other such reservations? Though I don't know why they would need to hide that, if it were so. Or maybe they're doing projects in there that they want to hide from the Hemispheric Union."

"And here we are," said Kathy, "flying to _defend_ the government which does all these things." She could say it openly, since no one on board either of the Tu-95's liked the Fairness Party any better than she did.

"For what it's worth," Lewandowski told her, "we're NOT defending that government; we're defending innocent civilians, who might be harmed by the actions of another dictatorship--one which, as you know, is even worse than the one you are compelled to obey." He turned to Emilio. "Sergeant, you'd better get back to your station. Captain Finnegan will want us to be ready to start hacking the satellites as soon as we're close to exiting the weather, even though we're not expecting bandits till after we're out of Texas airspace. But thanks for the talk."
 
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There was no unnecessary talk inside Colt Finnegan's Bear bomber. But if the sortie commander's thoughts had been audible, he would have produced a roomful of chatter by himself.

They had taken off early in the day, and expected to be over Kansas while there still was a good piece of daylight left. Intelligence--not so much the genteel "authorized" spying which was now the province of the State Department, as the information that Lewandowski's friends had slipped to the Rangers--indicated strongly that the next aerial aggression by the Aztlanos would occur over western Kansas.

Fairness Party dignitaries, who drank tequila with the same thugs who had sent jets against Texas, were not the ones to collect information that mattered; and yet it was necessary for the "Sky Rangers," as some of the aviators were calling themselves, to give these politicians an explanation of why they thought Kansas was the target, _without_ exposing the true source. The reality was that secret agents inside Aztlan, including Gloria Cervantes, had been following the actions and communications of Los Flechadores, the Aztlano gang which had the largest inventory of combat aircraft other than those retained by the Aztec-Maoist regime itself. Flechadores had flown at least one of the sorties against Texas. But what was being told to the Jessica Trevette administration was that because Aztlano raiders on the ground had done their recent kidnappings of skilled professionals mostly in Kansas, they were expected to use their own consequent updated knowledge of that locale to select good targets to bomb.

Of course, not ALL the kidnappings had been from Kansas. Around the time the Tu-95 crews began to take turns eating lunch, they passed over an Oklahoma region which had also been hit: the Woodford Shale Field, a major natural-gas extraction area. Natural gas being considered "clean enough," it was extracted outside as well as inside the Western Enclave, without raising the public panic which the Fairness Party itself loved to raise about coal and uranium. (They would still have been raising panic about petroleum as well, if not for the fact that, following the Fairness Revolution, the newly-installed regime had submitted to having China extract for its own use all petroleum to be found in Diversity States territory.) When Aztlan had begun making trouble earlier this year, several top energy-industry technicians had been kidnapped from the Woodford area's gas-well sites.

The two Texas Bears continued on, passing into Kansas airspace. If no enemy planes turned up today, they would land at two separate airports; there, they would let themselves be seen off-loading empty freight containers, to convince any watcher that they did have a non-combative errand. Then they would take to the air again at sunrise. The Sky Rangers had not yet had a chance to engage hostiles in the air; when the chance came, they intended for the Aztlanos to be thoroughly and rudely surprised.

But as things turned out, they didn't have to wait for the next day....
 
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Captains Finnegan and Lewandowski had both ordered g.p.s. deception while still over Oklahoma. Emilio on Lewandowski's plane, and his counterpart Sally Pitt on Finnegan's plane, had multiple con-jobs to pull on the satellites. Making them think there was no plane there at all was only one version--the one they resorted to when passing over nature preserves. They could also tell the satellites that they were smaller planes, even helicopters or hovercraft. Every identity they assumed for their planes was a real craft in the databases, but one which in reality was grounded at the time in order not to have the system ask why one contact could be airborne in two places at once.

When they reached western Kansas, the sun was halfway down the western sky. "If they come now, they'll be coming out of the sun," remarked Greg Jessup, Finnegan's co-pilot.

"That's why we should be glad we've got more than the naked eye to spot 'em with." On an encrypted channel, Finnegan then instructed Lewandowski to descend to altitude 7,500 meters, while the lead plane climbed to 11,000 meters. Horizontal separation between them was nine kilometers. They flew a weaving pattern, one moving closer to the Aztlano border when the other moved away from it; but neither aircraft ever went far enough west that the Aztlanos could make any claims of _their_ airspace being invaded. The chief radio operators on both Bears were monitoring frequencies used by air traffic controllers, police and emergency services, in case this might yield an advance hint of incoming bandits.

But it was Ranger Sally Pitt who first acquired. She and Emilio had their terminals looking for suspicious tracks on g.p.s. at the same time as they were keeping the g.p.s. in the dark about their own planes. "Three bandits, true bearing 253 from us, course 064!" Sally sang out. She said that much aloud simply to be sure she had her pilot's attention; the data would be appearing on Finnegan's own display, and on Lewandowski's by data-sharing. The jets were six kilometers higher than Finnegan, but were descending in altitude. With satellite tracking, these enemies could be noticed while they were still far enough away that there was time for their interceptors to make ready. Not a lot of time; but the crews already had a general idea of how they would proceed. The weapon operators were more than ready.

Having Sally's data, Emilio looked to see if--yes! "Three more, bearing 240, farther away than the first three! Recommend holding fire as long as possible, so all are surprised!"

"Concur!" snapped Lewandowski. He had heard about Emilio's exploit playing bait in a defenseless helicopter, and wondered if the Ranger sergeant was feeling indestructible because of that success; but he didn't waste time commenting on that.

With no air-to-air radar painting them, Finnegan and Lewandowski coolly allowed the first three jets to pass right by them. Something they had discussed before the Texan sortie ever began was the fact that planes in threes were almost never on an air-to-air combat mission, almost always on a bombing mission. Cameras on the Bears caught and froze images of the fighter-bombers going over: sure enough, they had bombs on their underwing hardpoints. Add this to the blatant violation of Diversity States airspace, and--

"Line dance, I lead!" shouted Finnegan. The code phrase meant that the lead plane, his, would engage the enemies that had already passed east of them, while the second plane would fire upon the second element as soon as they made their own illegal crossing.

Coaxing all the speed he could get out of his counter-rotating propellers, Finnegan pursued the nearest of his three targets, ordering concentrated fire on it. Better to kill one than to miss three. Both particle beams and 25mm chain guns, with targetting input from the g.p.s. feed, opened up on the right-side jet. But there were enough compact missiles on board (some on the wings, some in a weapons bay) to be lavish; four of them went after each unsuspecting fighter-bomber, all at once.

The cannon shells failed to hit Finnegan's first target; but the gunnery computer, aware of this, shut off the guns before too much ammo could be wasted to no purpose. The guns would have their moment in case of a closing target. The particle beams, on the other hand, had no problem overtaking. The bandit spun crazily; its pilot and weapons officer must have been fried to death instantly, at the same time as their controls were fried.

"Come on, hurry!" Greg Jessup yelled. He was yelling at the missiles that were aimed for the already-stricken jet. Though no longer a combat threat, that Aztlano plane still was a very big mass of metal-particle composites, falling onto a populated area. But with no countermeasures in use and no evasive action, all four missiles easily struck the falling jet; the combined explosions, setting off the fuel tanks and the never-used bombs as well, reduced the target to such small fragments that there were not likely to be any civilians killed by their fall. The two survivors of the enemy's first wave _were_ now using countermeasures and evasive maneuvers to escape the missiles after them; but they clearly were unsure who it was that had fired on them. As far as _they_ could see, there were neither fighter planes nor surface emplacements to be firing at them.

And while they were dodging the missiles, and trying to spot the non-existent opposing jets....a hail of bullets found them. Saving power on the particle beams, Finnegan found his chain guns able to do the job at the current target aspect. And as with the first victim, the still-active missiles demolished these planes enough to minimize the debris danger to human life on the ground.

All this happened quickly, which is the nature of aerial combat. But although the Texan radio operators had not confirmed any calls from the first Aztlano element to the second, the second element behaved as if they knew something was amiss with their friends. Emilio detected them levelling off, spreading out laterally--still closing. And the electronic-warfare station reported them illuminating radar.

Lewandowski dropped his plane another two kilometers, almost low enough to run into civilian helicopters. The jets would have downward-looking radar; but the amount of confusion the Texans had created might still prevent a propellor-driven craft from being the first "suspect" in the minds of the Aztlano pilots. Emilio mentally prayed it would be so....

And so it proved. The second trio of border violators flew right past Lewandowski's Bear, paying it no heed. Being in Diversity States airspace and using combat radar, they were fair game if anyone ever was.

Lewandowski's plane launched _five_ missiles for each target. Starting from below and behind, these missiles were in the blindest part of the space around their quarry. Two of the planes, thus four of the enemy aviators, died before they knew what was happening. The last jet, alerted by the explosive deaths of the others, managed to shake off the missiles chasing it, and fired a missile of its own at what its weapons officer guessed to be the threat, namely Finnegan's plane. But having been frugal with his particle beams, Finnegan could now use them to stop the incoming missile with time to spare; and Lewandowski's beams, once the firecontrol computer was sure Finnegan was not in the line of fire, barbecued the last fighter-bomber, which again was further disintegrated by the missiles which belatedly overtook it.

Something like rebel yells filled the interiors of the victorious defending aircraft. One of the weapon operators whooped to Emilio, "Clean sweep! Don't mess with Texas!" Another operator, more soberly, observed, "But we don't know how much data the Aztlano command structure may have been able to pick up about what happened."

"We'll have to assume, until we know otherwise, that they did get enough information to realize how we did this," Emilio told his friends. "But it's still a good day. All of them down, with no losses for us. And Aztlan _doesn't_ have an unlimited supply of jet fighters. They can't afford much attrition."

Captain Lewandowski's voice cut in on the intercom. "Stay on the lookout, in case more were sent." But no more bandits appeared that day. For now, it was good guys six, bad guys zero.

Captain Finnegan's brain still was churning at high speed. It would be good if they could find out whether today's air strike had been a diversion as the strikes against West Texas had been, or whether there had been a particular target in Kansas which the Aztlanos had considered worth bombing for its own sake.
 
At the moment when the two Texas Tu-95's detected the incoming aggressor jets, an open-topped, propane-powered overland vehicle belonging to the D.S. Forestry Service was cruising along near the Great Plains District's border with Aztlan (what would once have been called the Kansas-Colorado state line). This was due west of Sharon Springs, the only city of any size now inhabited this close to the west end of Kansas. It was enlarged by an influx from elsewhere. Many of the former towns in the western half of Kansas had been evacuated the summer before last, in order to fence off another nature preserve; and many of the dislocated residents of those towns, not being internal exiles, had been provided with living quarters in Sharon Springs...if only in Collective Dormitories.

Sharon Springs, which was the target of the Aztlano fighter-bombers, had been visited in the morning by someone whose opposition to truth and freedom was expressed by words rather than by bombs: broadcast journalist Dynamo Earthquake. Accompanied by a female camera operator named Freya Vanaheim (even blockier in physique than Dynamo), she had been interviewing any Kansas residents she could find who had known persons kidnapped by previous Aztlano raids on the ground. Her assignment, of course, was to find anything she could use to make it appear that there COULD NOT be any other motive than racism, for Diversity States citizens to object to Aztlano gangsters invading the Great Plains District and kidnapping people. To this end, of course, she had carefully avoided speaking with any _Hispanics_ who had had loved ones kidnapped and didn't like it.

Now, Dynamo and Freya were being driven along the border by a female Forest Ranger named Kelly Wishart, finding spots where Dynamo could pose on camera, gesture to the prairie, and add gratuitous remarks about the anti-Aztlano racism also being tied to the bourgeois corporate interests that wanted to destroy all life on the prairie just because they hated everyone and everything. But whatever the two newswomen were paid to think, the forest ranger still had to deal with the real world; thus, she had a sophisticated motion-detector suite watching the border fence, and she was armed with a high-powered, laser-guided rifle. Armed similarly, and also vigilant, was the only male in the vehicle: a man who could not easily be pigeonholed as a white supremacist, being black--District Inspector Leroy Lincoln.

Kelly's motion detector took in airborne motion. Thus, when a sound of jet planes became audible from the Aztlano side of the border, she knew at once that the planes were closing. There was just time to shout, and to swerve the prairie car into the relative concealment of some trees on a creek, before the first three jets roared overhead, on their way eastward to bomb the city Dynamo and her camerawoman had been in hours before.

"Oh, no! Don't those pilots know the danger they're in?" wailed Freya. "They could be killed by the fascists!" The hulking young woman had not the slightest clue about the _actual_ peril the Aztlano gangster-aviators were bringing upon themselves; she feared for them because of the imaginary evils that her journalist had been conjuring up. Immersed in the lies herself, the camerawoman had not noticed that all through this trip, Dynamo had been doing the propaganda job mechanically, not with her former zeal.

Inspector Lincoln, on the other hand, had at least a suspicion that the Texas Rangers to whom he had once given a secret briefing, might be closer by, and ready to do more against raiders, than the Aztlanos could have guessed. One thing caught his attention: the airspace violators had come in from a more southerly direction than would be likely if they came from the former U.S. Air Force bases in the Denver-Colorado Springs area. Perhaps this was a tactic to make the strike more of a surprise? Lincoln fervently hoped that the Texans _were_ around, and that they had something effective up their sleeves.

Dynamo was getting some words on video, neutral words about the overflight of the jets, leaving herself free to embellish as events called for, when a booming noise reached their ears from the direction of Sharon Springs. "Let's head back, in case we're needed!" Lincoln shouted to Kelly, who turned her vehicle accordingly. They had not gone far before new jet sounds were heard from the west, and the forest ranger called out, "Those are also incoming!"

Lincoln slapped the bewildered Freya on the shoulder. "Try to get those on camera this time!" Though scared by the thought of getting too close to real violence, Freya did as he urged; and when the second element flew over, she did capture good images of them. Having done so, she got her boss back in the frame again. "We're fearing the worst," said Dynamo, sticking to the approved narrative; "by the time we get back to Sharon Springs, the white-supremacist bigots may have claimed more victims!"

By the time they returned to the city, the aerial action was long concluded, and no one in the air or on the ground had died _except_ the Aztlano fliers who had come to kill American civilians. The stunning reversal suffered by the "noble" invaders was enough to reverse, for a little while at least, the drift away from party orthodoxy that Dynamo had been experiencing.

But Leroy Lincoln, a forceful man when he had to be, did not allow Freya's video record to be tampered with before the raw footage had been made known to authorities in the city, and transmitted unaltered to other authorities in Kansas City. Still views of the second group of Aztlano jets enabled confirmation that they had been carrying live bombs.

Thus, whichever way Dynamo Earthquake's personal opinions might waver in the next few days, the genie was out of the bottle; plenty of people in the Diversity States _would_ know that the Aztlano aviators HAD NOT been innocent, martyred victims of neo-Nazi stormtroopers.
 
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Well, Pitchike, I need to bring the narrative back inside the Enclave, both because Bert Randall still is in there, and because I have to show how Miguel De Soto gets his gill implants. Not to mention the several subplots of Alipang and his family and the Grange volunteers. After devoting a chapter to those inside the fence, I expect to be jumping outside the fence once more, to catch up on a couple of characters who have been offstage for quite awhile. Can you guess who those are?
 
Before I start the next chapter, here's another summary:


Alipang and Major Yang had their friendly martial-arts match. The Major scored higher in barehanded fighting, then Alipang pulled ahead in stick fighting. Yang kept his promise to support the request for the operation for Mr. De Soto, and Bert Randall added his own persuasion. The Enclave authorities gave permission for the life-extending operation.

Leaving Wyoming, Yang took with him the information from Mr. Tomisaburo, that the Deputy Commander of Overseers has been up to something which he seems to be hiding from his own government. Torn between sympathy for the exiles and his duty to protect Agent Tomisaburo's identity, Yang left Alipang a vaguely-worded message (slipped in with notes on kung-fu technique), that Alipang should watch for signs of a power struggle among the ruling class, and be alert for ways to turn such a situation to his people's advantage. The Major handed over Tomisaburo's report to a Chinese intelligence officer at a consulate. When Yang and his Thai-born wife were last seen in Beijing, they were on their way to becoming Christians.

Summer and Evan have gotten back another of their children, their firstborn Michael--though this happened offstage. Now only one of the Rand children remains to be reclaimed, nine-year-old Anne-Marie; and she has been promised freedom after she dances in one performance at the Orbital Palace. That outer-space resort is the location where the Diversity States, with no more manned space program of its own, is petitioning the Chinese to allow Americans to make scientific use of the Chinese Moon colony. Ambassadors Samantha Ford and Carlota Ruiz found themselves BOTH assigned to this effort by contradictory orders. The only persons pleased about this were their respective aides, Cassandra and Nalani, who thus had their first chance to get acquainted with each other.

Brendan Hyland had to run one more mission for New Vatican security in Nigeria, before starting his service with the secret army he has joined. Unfortunately (though not likely to affect him personally at present), the propagandist Reltseotu Smith, associated with political hack Neutron Invincible, has made Brendan a target of the latest made-up accusations of "racist Christian genocide."

I have now revealed to the reader that the good-guy spies operating in Aztlan are part of the same network Brendan joined. This network supports the efforts of the Texas Rangers (including Emilio Vasquez) to combat Aztlano attacks on the Diversity States. As depicted in the chapter just finished, the Rangers' new air-defense squadron is doing well so far.
 
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Copperfox said:
Well, Pitchike, I need to bring the narrative back inside the Enclave, both because Bert Randall still is in there, and because I have to show how Miguel De Soto gets his gill implants. Not to mention the several subplots of Alipang and his family and the Grange volunteers. After devoting a chapter to those inside the fence, I expect to be jumping outside the fence once more, to catch up on a couple of characters who have been offstage for quite awhile. Can you guess who those are?
Click to expand...

Maybe...:rolleyes:, but not so sure.:eek:
 
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