Chapter 9: Grandma’s House

Fiji 2, January 19, 2132
Grandma’s House

“Those poor kids,” said Edith Clark, Ray’s mother. It took her forever to settle them down and get them to go to sleep in their little cabana. The two youngsters believed they were responsible for their parent’s deaths. They weren’t quite sure how they were responsible, but they felt guilty nonetheless. “How long have they been holding all of that back?”

“Since day two,” said Ray. “When I told them that we were going to earth to see Grandma they shut it all away.”

“What are you going to do with them?”

“Whatever it takes.” Ray threw a shell into the calm ocean as they walked. “I want to detonate all of Bradbury Canal so I can be sure I got the one that killed them.”

“How do you know the attack didn’t come from Perseverance, or Copernicus, or even Kōngchéng?”

“Kōngchéng is a graveyard,” muttered Ray.

“Don’t be so certain about that,” said his mom. “I’ve been following Eastern Block influences in space for a very long time and there’s one thing that I know for certain about the Eastern bloc, if you believe something about them, it’s because they want you to believe it.”

She was right, Dame Edna had been in the spy business her entire life, so were her children. Ray could deal with agents from the Eastern Bloc all day long, but a teenage girl terrified him. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with Christa, she’s a young lady coming into her own, I don’t know how to deal with that. What do I do when she walks into my room with a tampon and asks, ‘How do I use this?’”

“First of all, Christa is sixteen, she knows. Second of all, there’s instructions on every package.” Edna clutched Ray’s arm and rested her head on his shoulder. Ray was a political mastermind, a schemer, a man who could twist the eastern bloc to his will if he tried. Laurel was the scientist. She and Harrison could develop a million ways to pass a covert message and never be discovered. What went wrong?

“What do we do now?” demanded Ray.

“Right now, you take several weeks, stay here and mourn your sister with your father and I.”

“And then?” asked Ray. All he needed was a plan. As long as he had a plan, no matter how bad it sucked, he felt secure that he could work that plan to success.

“Let’s consider leaving Christa here with me. She’s got the grades; she can enroll in Denver. Alan isn’t subtle enough for Denver he strikes me as a fighter. You take Alan back to Mars until he’s ready for the academy and we’ll see how he does with a pair of laser canons at his command. In the meantime, you go into politics and work the investigation from that end.”

Ray brightened slightly. A plan! Or at least part of a plan. The Denver that his mother mentioned was not a city in Colorado, nor was it a school that you could openly enroll in. Denver was the code name for a training system, a method of training someone for the espionage arts. Denver could occur anywhere. As for the Academy, she was talking about any one of the armed services academies: the Naval Academy at Annapolis, the Army Academy at West Point, the Space Force Academy at Trinity City on Luna, and the Marine Academy on Camp Schmitt in geosynchronous orbit above the Camp Lejune crater.

“Oh, I almost forgot, the paperweights have been exposed. We got the data but the op has been discovered,” said Ray.

“By who?” demanded Edna. The paperweights were a beautiful piece of spy craft. Harrison and Laurel worked on that system for years.