Easter Egg Hunt: A Christmas Story
by Jeffery D. Kooistra
Illustration by Janet Aulisio
The red light on my portaphone blinked not quite in time with the few Christmas lights I’d strung to decorate my spare apartment. I answered, “Yeah?”
“Morgan. This is Capt. Phillips. We have an assignment. A big one. Code one. We need you to report to Command.”
“Oh, c’mon, Mark,” I said. “Cut the official bullshit. I’m a civilian agent now, remember? And it’s Christmas time, for crying out loud. What kind of mission do you need me for?”
“All right, Jake,” he said. “How would you like to spend Christmas in a Christmas card?”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“You’ll find out when you get here.”
“And about that—why me? I’m not on holiday duty. I’m supposed to have this week off,” I protested.
“You’re the best.”
“Horseshit.”
“OK. The best that’s also single. Did you actually have plans this year, Jake?” He knew I didn’t. I never did. He continued. “What do you want me to do—send an agent with a family he could otherwise be with? All you’re going to do is sit on your butt in your apartment and you know it. This will do you good.”
Mark is a great boss and a good man, but he knows me altogether too well. I sighed. “OK. What is it I have to do?”
“You’re going on an Easter egg hunt, and that’s all I’m telling you until you get here,” he said; and he signed off.
I took a hopper over Mare Crisium from Luna City to the High Command complex buried under the mountains on the north end of the mare. The System Patrol had originally had just a landing field out there, but had built on to it and hollowed out tunnels in the hills, and what with the war with the Belt a few years ago, the place had ballooned into a huge underground complex. I’d never followed all of the hallways and corridors, mainly because Mark had his office in the first tunnel in from the landing bays.
I berthed the hopper, went through the usual checks, and was with Mark only one hour after he’d called. He was already at his desk when I arrived and he got right to it.
“Know what this is, Jake?” he said, holding up a chrome shiny egg-shaped and -sized object, swinging gently from a lanyard strung through a small loop on the end.
“An Easter egg?” I ventured.
“That’s right. Or rather, this is a mock-up. The real ones are too dangerous to keep around.”
He handed it to me. I was surprised by its mass—easily four kilos. That wasn’t anything here in Mark’s office—the High Command still keeps the base at normal Moon gravity. But you wouldn’t want to lug the thing around for long if you were in the one g pseudograv field of Luna City.
The device only had two buttons on it and a small indicator display. I played with the buttons. One was for setting times. The other was a scale that went from .5 KT to 12 KT, whatever that meant. I gave Mark a quizzical look.
“It’s a dial-a-yield nuke. Good for half a kiloton to twelve. This is a top-secret commando device. Tell anyone about it and I’ll have to kill you.” He smiled when he said that but he still might have meant it.
I’d never heard of a variable nuke being this small, but I took what he said in stride. “How does it work?”
“Kind of simple, actually. A slurry of fusion fuel, a hypercapacitor, and some nifty work with Dykstra shield technology. A minute fraction of the slurry is flash compressed to fusion and that sets off whatever fraction of the rest you set to have detonated. This ain’t the kind off thing you’d like to lose in your apartment, is it?”
“No,” I said. “So where did we lose one?”
“It was stolen,” Mark said. “One malcontent commando went around the bend and left one on Earth with some folks he just didn’t like. We know who those folks are. We know it’s set to go off some time Christmas morning. That just leaves thousands of square kilometers to search.”
“No problem,” I deadpanned. “What will I do to fill up the rest of the afternoon?”
We got down to details. Mark turned on his wall display and showed me a map of the northeast coast of what used to be the USA. “Right there, Jake. The Republic of Currier and Ives. He left it somewhere down there.”
“Those nuts?” I said. The inhabitants of Currier and Ives were a throwback group, with the most restrictive laws on Earth, enacted in a vain attempt to roll back the clock.
“ ‘Citizens,’ Jake.”
The commando’s name was Manfred Rolff. He’d actually grown up in Currier and Ives, but Mark didn’t know what had made the guy mad enough to leave a nuke hidden down there. We d never find out, either—Rolff had been psychotic, and the other commandoes had been forced to kill him when they tried to bring him in.
I spent the four-hour shuttle trip down to Earth reading up on Currier and Ives. The nation was formed shortly after the Collapse out of the former states of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, and parts of Massachusetts. Their philosophy, I discovered in my reading, involved trying to create a society that adhered to the “old US as described by Tocqueville in Democracy in America,” whatever that was. Also, they’d wanted to make a country that actually looked like prints from old Currier and Ives Christmas cards, plates, tins, and whatnot. The theory was that the Currier and Ives prints captured a “spirit of America,” an America that was good and wholesome and worth living in.
To each his own, but I sure as hell wouldn’t have wanted to live under their load of laws and regulations. Visions of a list of “thou shalt nots” a kilometer long rolled through my mind.
Mark had told me that the governor of Currier and Ives would meet me at the spaceport, someone named Joe Wood, and he was the only one who knew why I was coming. He’d insisted on dealing with me himself, and not through some underling.
It didn’t matter much, not as far as I could see. No matter who met me, after landing I’d only have thirty-six hours to find and deactivate the Easter egg before it went off and made the Christmas card look like season’s greetings from Hiroshima.
The shuttle fell slowly out of the sky over the frosty Atlantic Ocean. I’d been born in the desert southwest, so oceans weren’t something I was used to. Besides, that was forty years ago, and I hadn’t been down to Earth in a decade.
Approaching the coast, I could see that Currier and Ives was certainly going to have a white Christmas this year. The land was white from horizon to horizon, though at the moment the sky was crystal blue.
The Patrol shuttle grounded on the large but vacant local pad, and took off again even before I finished walking through the short tunnel and into the reception area. This being the holidays, ordinarily the place should have been packed with tourists—families of sentimentalists showing up and hoping to find the true meaning of Christmas in the manufactured landscape of Currier and Ives. But the place was empty. I assumed that the powers that be had concocted some kind of cover Story to explain why the number one Christmas vacation spot in the Solar System was shut down until after the holidays, but I didn’t know what it was.
The reception area was a large, L-shaped room. I looked out a window and saw rows of empty stables, and outside of each, a sleigh standing ready. There wouldn’t be any sleigh rides this Christmas.
When I said the place was empty, I meant the governor wasn’t there either. That ticked me off. I hoped he’d show up soon since I didn’t have much time. I didn’t know what kind of a nut he was going to be.
I walked toward the back of the room and turned the corner. I found the true meaning of Christmas.