Read April for Free Online Page A

to believe, the way she crashed around, that she could put on magnifiers and do the most delicate work bare-handed, where others needed reducing Waldos. She had a major talent with anything electronic and dressed like a techie too, simple and utilitarian. Her face was presentable, with a nose which could even be called cute. But it suffered from an overdose of average. There was no real prominent feature and her hair was a very ordinary brown. But there was nothing at all ordinary about the mind behind the face. Her best visible quality was ephemeral. When she smiled it lit her whole face up in a delightful display
    "I got your scanner all fixed up. It looks like an old Panasonic scanner on the outside, but all the old insides are gone and it's all modern voice command and computerized now. Ready to swap?" Heather asked, all eager and leaned over as if she was going to get it.
    "Please Heather, just leave it in the sack and I'll get it before I go. There's a security camera at the other end and Ruby sees everything. I'd rather not advertise I got anything from you."
    "OK, but you worry too much. The security vid gets its memory dumped in a day or two and Ruby is working away and won't pay any attention to us. Nobody will pay any attention to two girls having breakfast," she scoffed. She shoveled in oatmeal in precise little bites.
    Uh - huh, April thought to herself, you obviously know nothing about Ruby. She had no doubt at all if she asked Ruby tomorrow, she'd be able to tell her what Heather wore, which chair she sat in and she'd probably ask, Gave you something didn't she? As if she didn't know.
     April often felt like nobody ever told her anything, but a lot of com was still in the clear around M3. She was good enough at piecing together a fact here and there, into a whole. This scanner would let her figure out a great deal more than anybody would suspect. But not if she blatantly advertised what she had, so people watched their words, or worse, stopped her from using it.
    "It has all the old frequencies," Heather continued, "but now it scans all the way down to the millimeter stuff they use for locally for suits and ships." Then she dropped her voice despite having just declared how safe it was to do an exchange here. "It does what you asked for too. It will passively assemble voice and text calls off our local net, which are directed to other people's pad or phone. You just tell it the elements to look for in the system headers. You have to teach it your voice and a pass phrase first thing, because if anyone else tries to use it manually, or with another voice, the software to do the intercepts and all the files it captured get hard wiped."
    "You also have a readme file and tutorials you can access through the data port and you can tell it to watch and record just about any combo of things you want. The memory goes in where the battery was before. You have five Terabyte of memory now, but you can add more if you want. The unit is self powered from ambient light, so you don't want to stash it away in the dark for a long time. It deliberately wipes everything if it gets too low." April lifted an inquiring eyebrow at that.
    "It has some very private software some Moon friends traded to us, so it wipes everything if you try to open it, or access the operating system. We promised not to share it so we had to do that. It has a pretty decent biometric program to gauge veracity, about plus or minus 4% accurate. Do you have my chips to swap?"
    "You're getting a delivery tonight of disposables and clothing," April told her. "I already gave them to a buddy in Housekeeping to drop in your delivery bin. It's all sealed up in security tape so nobody can mess with it. Same tape key we used before. The chips are from some stuff to be pulled out of service and sent ground side, but they don't have serial numbers to worry about. It's all from stuff on the scrap list anyway."
    "OK," Heather said. She looked disappointed, but she quickly