Short stories…

Shorts just don’t seem to excite people very much. I’ve kept “Common Ground and Other Stories” cheaper than the novels, but it has never sold well. I’m just going to put it at a buck and hope if people will buy it for that price they’ll consider the others. I’d like people to try it because I think they are some of my best work.

Various works in progress…

I actually have seven books in progress. When I have an idea I usually start a book by writing the first chapter. I also have a few books that are just a few paragraphs on what the main story line will be. A couple are well along. One at 70k+ words. This is one where I just have the first chapter, and I won’t get back to it for awhile, so don’t expect more soon. I’m thinking a “A Quick Clean Victory” for a title.

Chapter 1
“What are the numbers?” Commander Three Fingers demanded.
“Oxygen is about one part in five, maybe a little low, gravity is high, eight parts per hundred extra from standard. Spin is about seven-eighths of a standard day. The planet must have a big iron core,” the navigator/astrophysicist Blue mused.
“Temperature?” The officer asked gruffly. He wasn’t interested in abstract knowledge now.
“Well below the zero point of water freezing at the axis ends, all over the scale elsewhere. I’m seeing some areas at near half the scale to boiling, the terrain is rugged with large mountains and active volcanism on several continents. Temperature varies with altitude and proximity to the large bodies of water. It has a big tilt to its axis too. There’s more water than land, and it seems to be deeper than we can measure on passive scan out this far. Once we get well inside the orbit of that big moon I’ll get a reading.”
“Why don’t you sweep it with low frequency radar then?” Three Fingers asked, irritated.
“There is a technological presence on the planet. They may easily detect us, if I go to active scan.”
“Shit.”
“Worse than that, I detect neutrino emissions and artificial satellites,” Blue said, quietly.
“People?” Three Fingers asked, tense.
“Not our kind, nor Tigers, nor Bugs,” Blue assured him. “But whatever they are there’s a lot of them. I can already see surface artifacts.”
“Set for stealth running, no emissions, not even internal wireless,” Three Fingers ordered. The flight deck sounded with a brief buzz, as a dozen belt communicators vibrated, and displayed a notice that all com was restricted to hard wired.
“There’s no artificial radiation from other planets in the system,” Blue added.”I’d be surprised if they are advanced enough to detect such low powered emissions.”
“So would I,” Three Fingers agreed. “And the last thing I need right now is any more surprises. I wish we could just pass on to the next few systems, and not have to deal with them.”
“Chances of a planet on which we could survive are so low it would be suicide. We have limited life support, several critical systems without redundancy, leaks it is impossible to evaluate without going EV, and a lot of our spare parts were blown to hell in the beam hole blown through decks twenty-six and twenty-seven by that Bug cruiser. Most folks would say we are unbelievably lucky to take a clean through beam weapon hit and not break up. Have you ever heard of it happening before?” Blue asked.
“No, but odds were pretty slim we’d come out of jump fifty man lengths from the Bugs. They were so close the beam didn’t have enough range to spread. And the bridge record shows they fired faster than any biological reaction time, so it was an automated response. They probably never saw any need to program their systems to hold fire if the target was too close.”
“And we jumped back out on automatic too,” Blue reminded him needlessly. Their problem then had been that they couldn’t turn the faster than light drive off, and nobody had ever proposed such a problem occurring, much less a fix. They had finally cut the power panel to the whole ship, to let it drift, allowing someone to disassemble the drive controls, coasting dark and without any gravity. “The beam was probably still on when we disappeared. I imagine none of them actually saw us until later when they reviewed their cameras as to why their weapon fired, and why there was a sudden debris field expanding away from them. We appeared and left faster than your brain could register it. I just wish our weapons had been programmed to fire automatically too.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Three Fingers assured him. “The tidal forces from jumping out that close will have warped and damaged the Bug cruiser badly. I don’t know about Bugs, but the tidal gradient would have been sufficient to kill or injure most of our crew were our actions reversed. If they didn’t have help close at hand, they might not have had sufficient crew functional to save the ship. Be glad they didn’t have it automated to jump out first if there was a ship too close.”
“Pilot, ease us into an orbit around the metastable point between the planet and the giant moon, with as little observable drive use as possible. Make it a big enough loop we are not silhouetted against the bright face of the satellite. I want to know some basics before we go in any closer. How many natives, some idea what they look like, and the level of their technology. Start accumulating data about their language, and if it has an acoustical component we can hear or speak. I’m exhausted. I’m taking a rest period, as should any of the prime team who have been up so long. I’ll examine your reports when rested, and we change shifts.”
* * *
“How many languages?” Three Fingers asked. Blue wasn’t sure he believed him.
“I’m pretty sure I’ve identified seventeen, but I really expect to find more.”
“This is insane. We don’t have the assets to deal with that many languages. They have world-wide travel, why would they retain isolated languages?”
“I have no idea, but here is something interesting. They use one language for air traffic control. The same language that is used at several widely separated, but large areas on the planet. We’re concentrating on it, because we can record their instructions to an aircraft, and then watch how it maneuvers.”
“That has promise,” Three Fingers agreed. He put a thumb along his jaw and his three fingers across his chin, deep in thought. The maimed hand still bothered Blue, after serving with him for years, but he forced himself not to look away.
“They have image transmission, in fact sequence video, which gives us a good idea how fast their nervous systems work and how fast they can react,” Blue boasted. “They are really similar to us. Upright bipeds with a similar face, but only one thumb, thinner, and the young feeding glands are weird, up near their arm pits instead of down on their hips. I’ll put a couple on the screen,” he offered.
After a few minutes study Three Fingers asked to make sure, “These are all the same race?”
“Yes, there is quite a wide range of physical size, pigmentation, and hair patterns.”
“I’d have said they are dainty compared to us, except for that fellow,” He pointed out a screen capture of a Suma wrestler, scowling with greased hair tied back tightly.
“Yes, he reminds me disturbingly of my mother-in-law,” Blue revealed. “The same hair too.”
“No wonder you signed up for the deep sky services,” Three Fingers understood at last.
“We have an approximation of their basic unit of length. Their man length is about two of their units called meters. They run an extra one part in ten taller than us – mostly,” Blue hedged. We have their numerals with some certainty, which are base ten, and enough videos had time counters we found there common short time unit is very close to our second. But it appears they count time in increments of sixty instead of a hundred. Don’t ask me why.”
“It looks like they have never had contact with another race, that’s to the good, because they won’t have technological weapons. By this cultural stage territorial disputes should be historic, and military weapons a curiosity in museums, if they’ve never faced anything like the Bugs.”
“Maybe…I’ve seen some strange things I can’t explain,” Blue admitted.
“Like what?” Three Fingers demanded.
“We saw several groups of ships like this,” Blue explained, putting an overhead view on the screen. It showed a number of surface vessels clustered around a big ship. “Look at the big ship closer,” he invited and zoomed in on it.
“Aircraft? Fixed wing aircraft on an ocean going vessel? Do they need them for refueling stations? Do they use really low energy density fuels? I can’t see this being economically viable. How big is that vessel?” he demanded.
“Half the length of the Protector,” Blue told him. “Greater than half our volume though.”
Three Fingers contemplated that silently a bit.
“However, they don’t store them all on deck, like we grapple our combat shuttles. They take them below decks on elevators and carry a variety of aircraft. Most of them seem to loiter around the ship awhile, and then land again. They will fly a big oval above the group at about a hundred-sixty man-lengths per second. A few times they would sprint off at three hundred man lengths per second. The thermal signature indicates they use air-breathing rockets.”
“That’s mighty expensive technology,” Three Fingers protested. Back on Home I, there were only a couple hundred fast couriers using that sort of engine.
“They have thousands of aircraft using that sort of propulsion,” Blue assured him. “Oh, and while we were watching, a small aircraft left this small island here,” he drew a circle on the screen with his pointer, ” and it landed on the big ship deck. It flew at over seven hundred man- lengths per second. As close as we can see it doesn’t have any wings. It must derive all its lift and control from the body shape.”
“There have been proposals to build such a thing from time to time,” Three Fingers acknowledged. “In theory it could be done, with exotic materials, but it would cost hundreds of times what a conventional aircraft would. The Bugs and the Tigers certainly have never made one, so we have little incentive to make one to match them. It seems like if you are going to that much expense, you might as well go ahead and build an orbital shuttle.”
“Oh, the neutrino emissions I spoke of? It is hard to localize, but it appears some of the ships are nuclear powered. It is an odd pattern, as if it is not just one fuzzy dot localized on the big ship but several nodes in the neutrino detector nearby. You know it doesn’t give a super sharp image,” Blue said.
“Nuclear powered wet navy? It just keeps getting stranger and stranger. We need to send some drones, maybe even a manned shuttle down to collect data. Draw up a list of things that caught your interest. Oh, and send a long range disk drone to get a close look at that big ship. If we ever make it back home, they won’t believe that without pictures.”
* * *
Well away from land in the Indian Ocean, the battle group around the CVN 147 George W. Bush looked for hazards to come to them from the north and west, from the Indian subcontinent or Africa. That didn’t mean they didn’t watch the entire horizon. The Bush was the last built of the three carriers still in service of the double hulled Clinton class. All the new ones were submersibles. It had three times the deck area of the old Ford class. It could launch its entire fleet of aircraft in fifteen minutes, since none of them needed catapult assistance, and it could land them on four capture lanes, staggered at three minute intervals. The elevators took the recovered aircraft down on the inside, between the hulls, to access three hanger decks.
“Cap three turn to one-seven-three and go to FMP. Climb to 28k meters. We have a radar return that does not fit any know aircraft or missile closing at five, five, zero knots. We wish you to make a visual in passing. Cap four, go to 30k meters on one-seven-four, and loiter for possible intercept. We are broadcasting the standard warning to turn aside before the three hundred kilometer limit.”
Battle Group Commander Higgins had splashed three intruders in the last two years, who had tried to see how close they could get. Two were unmarked which was disturbing, and one had Pakistani marks which he flat out didn’t believe. Three hundred kilometers was way too close to allow something to approach so aggressively on a direct line for his carrier, but it was published doctrine for peace time, whatever that was. If he had an ongoing attack, he’d open his exclusion zone to a thousand kilometers, and if that happened to overlap the tip of India or Shri Lanka, tough shit. He had eight thousand lives and a couple Trillion dollars in his battle group, and he intended to return home with them all safe.
“Cap three, come left slightly as you will pass at five-hundred meters on your current heading. We’d like to get that down to two-hundred. Activate your sight camera, but do not go hot on weapons. You may back off FMP after passing and come around.”
Cap three, Alex Davison, put a little pressure on his stick to the left, and then came back on course, flipping the switches for the gun camera.
“Passing in twenty seconds from…Mark!”
At a combined speed of around three-thousand kilometers an hour Alex wasn’t going to read any nose art on what went past, but he was very unhappy at what he saw. At his silence the CDC prompted him. “Can you identify the intruder, Captain?”
“It’s an anomalous circular aircraft sir, very thin in cross section, and silvery metallic, sir.”
“What?”
“It’s a frigging flying saucer!” he blurted out. Crap. It might be a flying saucer, but if it didn’t turn aside pretty quickly, it was going to be confetti raining down on the ocean. He reduced power and started a long easy turn to the west, staying well away from behind what he was pretty sure would soon be a target.
“Splash him as soon as he is a centimeter inside the limit,” the Director ordered. “I don’t give a damn if he is waving at us, green with deely boopers, he doesn’t get a shot at the carrier.”
“Cap four, turn to one-seven-one and descend to 29k meters. You are weapons hot, repeat, weapons hot. Fire upon target lock. You should have him in range already.”
“Roger, hot and descending,” Hal Roberts acknowledged.
From when he activated the targeting radar, until acquired the incoming craft was only about three seconds. He selected a missile that was designed for a head on shots, but once it was released to his designated target it homed on its own radar. A gentle squeeze of the trigger on his stick sent it on its way. It popped from his weapons bay with a lurch, and a slight shudder of the airframe as the port opened and closed to allow it not to drop, but be thrown out. It launched inactive, but stabilized and the engine started. It passed him in less than a half second. It was a measure of his confidence in the weapon that he hadn’t asked to fire two of them. In the time it took him to blink there was an exhaust contrail to infinity from his viewpoint, the actual missile out of sight. In another two seconds there was a hot white spark of light at the end of the white thread. “Splash one,” he announced.
“AWACS confirms debris falling. That’s a definite kill,” CDC told him.
Does that mean I get to paint a little saucer on my kill marks? Hal wondered.
* * *
“Shiny, you’ve slicked drones like that around Bug missiles before. What happened?” Three Fingers asked. He didn’t seem angry, just genuinely curious.
“Oh, I jinked hard,” Shiny said, nervously wiping the bald top of his head that gave him his name. “I have to say that missile could really turn, and it was making radio emissions, I think it had its own radar, besides the one on the aircraft.”
The commander looked at the weapons operator, still sitting at the drone controls, digesting that. “Who the hell could afford to throw away an expensive radar set, on every individual missile they shoot off?” He finally asked. He didn’t really expect an answer, but the tech answered very literally, “Maybe they are all filthy rich.”
“They were repeatedly transmitting the same sequence on several different frequencies,” Blue said behind him. “I think we need to prioritize the words in that transmission in building the dictionary.”
“Sure, go ahead,” Three Fingers allowed. “But I think you can eliminate, ‘Welcome Galactic Travelers’ from your phrase list.”

Possible new cover –

More on book in progress. Title=HooDoo

This is one fairly far down the list I work on when I’m in the right mood. The first chapter was posted about a fellow attending the reading of his fathers will. That is at https://mackeychandler.com/?p=669

Chapter 2
The VIP hospitality lounge at Atlanta’s Hartsfield International was better than being on the concourse, only to the extent being in purgatory was rumored to be better than abiding in hell.
The lounge was not so much a perk, as an admission normal people could not suffer the indignities of air travel on a frequent basis, and stay sane. The sound level was lower, the seats softer, and the available fluid had hints of actual coffee flavor, instead of just a similar coloring.
His business partners were in an immediate tizzy about him leaving, trying to pin him down for remote conferences, and fax, and phone where they could reach him. He was frankly getting tired of their neediness. He didn’t mind being their partner, but he was getting damn tired of being a babysitter. There was enough to do managing the flux of a high tech business, without worrying about whether Glenda felt Marty didn’t take her seriously enough, or Paul was undermining Harold’s authority with his subordinates. He’d simply insisted – I’ll be gone… A few days or months without him, might show them they could solve some of their own little squabbles. If not, maybe it was time to reorganize. If that meant a few out the door – or even him leaving them all behind – so be it.
If he left that was the only way he could think of it – he’d be leaving them behind. They could sink or swim, but he had no doubt he’d be going forward. That sort of drive was his nature.
When the board call came for first class, he tossed the rest of his coffee in the trash and grabbed his single small carry-on and computer. The exit for the lounge opened right on the jet way, and he was visible for a handful of steps to the economy travelers, waiting in the public concourse. He searched the crowd for familiar faces, and noted a lot of them inspecting him. None registered recognition, since he wasn’t a movie star or a sports hero. Space electronics and military communications paid well, but it didn’t get you in the tabloids or attract groupies – unless you got really greedy and screwed up – David reflected, thinking of an ugly corporate scandal last year, that brought several people unwanted recognition.
David set his belt snug enough to do its job, and loose enough to allow it to stay fastened the whole flight. The coffee in the lounge guaranteed he’d get up at least once, but he always re-fastened the belt in his seat, aware turbulence or an unexpected maneuver could toss him out.
The numbers said their company would benefit from a small private jet. If it were just used for business that would be true, but he’s seen what happened when a company owned a plane. The thing was always tied up, carrying the officers of the company and their families to vacation spots, or shopping trips. He’s be just as bad as the rest of them, and if he wanted a jet he was determined he’d have it available full time for himself, and not do it by half measures, just so he didn’t have to use his own money. And if he bought one he’d qualify to fly it too.
He leaned back and closed his eyes, relaxing and feeling all the subtle changes as the jet came alive. Then the slight thump, as it disengaged it’s brakes and taxied on wheel motors. The slight pitching motions as it waddled over the seams on the concrete, and then a pause as it got in line to turn onto the runway.
After a few short rolls forward, they must be next in line, and he heard the engines spool up. There was the slight rumble of a flight that passed over them landing, and then he was pressed back in his seat hard as they rolled. The crew seemed sharp, the gear thumping back up into the plane within a second of the wheel noise cutting off, as the tires lifted from the pavement.
Then, instead of the slight cutback in power he was used to, they seemed to ease it on a bit harder, as they climbed out steeply. He wondered what instruction from the controllers, or concern of the pilot, caused that. Every time a few extra hundred gallons of fuel were used, it cut into the always precarious finances of the airline. He opened his eyes and looked out the window, where he could see the rear of the wing. The flaps were easing in but they still had the power set high, picking up speed without sacrificing the angle of climb. That didn’t concern him, because they were nowhere near the pitch that would get them into a stall.
Out there, beyond the wing he saw the answer to his question. A dark wall of dirty brown clouds, and as he watched a fractal tree of lightening etched briefly on its face. The pilot was pouring it on, climbing above incoming bad weather. He’d climbed out under full power other places with bigger worries, dropping flares behind them for any missiles climbing up their butt unseen. He trusted the man up front, having learned to do that, or be constantly concerned with things that were out of his hands.
As Atlanta dropped away he looked out over the suburban houses. If these people knew the information accessible to him, many of them would be upset. The latest generation of satellites could look down on a house, and see the electrical activity. You could tell when somebody was home, what room they were in, and if they ran a computer. The thermal image was detailed enough to tell if they kept a dog or a cat. He had no idea how yet, but he figured the day would come soon when they could capture the key strokes off the computer, and eavesdrop on the land line, and not from a van down the street but from orbit. The cell phones were certainly no challenge right now.
Combine that information with credit reports, phone logs, automobile tag scans, and public surveillance cameras, and anyone’s life was an open book. His life was too, but the huge difference was he knew it, and could take it into account. He didn’t talk on a cell phone for anything critical, and his roof at home and work, was a shield for any emissions he knew how to detect, and then a spoofed set of activities was substituted. A data hole attracted as much attention as unusual readings. His car got scanned like anyone’s but the laser didn’t see what the eye did. There had to be others who still had a measure of privacy, but not many.
This was after all what his company did. And unless somebody else was carefully hiding it, they were ahead of everybody else in that field. One of the reasons the company did so well, was they used the same sensors they sold the military for satellites, to gather industrial intelligence with their own drones. A security drone was easy to license, and once it was up there it had a side looking capacity to cover most of a city. If it didn’t cover where they needed, a small satellite office across town might be leased and sit empty, or used for storage to provide a reason to broaden their coverage.
They might not have the data processing capacity of the military, but it was astonishing what you could learn from seeing such mundane activity such as the arrival of supply trucks, and who worked over late at night, even if you never collected a word of internal dialogue. Sometimes the number of trucks leaving their docks each week was sufficient intelligence alone to buy a company’s stock, or short it.
Once they were above the weather they turned east, and it wasn’t long before the clouds were behind them and the sea underneath. There was a rush to the toilet once the seatbelt light was off, and he waited until the initial rush was over and used the facilities himself. He refused another round of coffee, or anything stronger, positioned his phone so it would rouse him to touch it, and tilted his seat back. It was a long flight and he was dressed for it, with loose clothing and soft shoes. Sleep came easily.
London was familiar to him, holding no particular fascination nor surprises anymore, but comfortable, more so really than Atlanta. Nobody assumed him an American here, much less any sub-category of American. He knew where to stay and where to eat, and could live here and be happy if there was reason to do so. He had a day to kill before he flew to Paris and Istanbul. He didn’t want to take British Airways direct, there was some tension right now between Britain and Djibouti. At the moment Americans were viewed more favorably, and France was still held in high regard. Nobody would hold a stamp on his passport against him. He’d only be in Istanbul a few hours, never leave the airport in fact. And by the time he reached Djibouti he’d be tired, jet lagged to some degree even with the pills and altering his sleep schedule. He’d hole up in the Menelik, a hotel one of his employees recommended as reasonable, clean, and in a safe location close to much of the city’s financial services. He’d spend a day or three until he felt acclimated to the time.