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While Nolan was spending a few minutes outside, Tiona called Cooper, “General, we appear to have a solid lock on your satellite. If you’ll give us the elements of the orbit you’d like it to have, we’ll start trying to position it for you.”

  Once Nolan and the others were back inside, Tiona had the saucer’s AI start adjusting their orbit. Though the grasping fixture was supposed to be strong enough to take significant loads, she still had the AI stay under a quarter G. That didn’t sound like much, but out in space, if you can just keep applying a quarter of a G it mounts up in a hurry.

  An hour later, they were heading back to Iowa to drop Bob off. Nolan turned to Tiona, “Sorry you didn’t get to go out. It wasn’t nearly as much fun as it will be once we have the harness though.”

  Bob said, “Harness?”

  “Tiona’s assigned me to design a ‘thruster harness.’ It’ll strap on over the skin suit coverall. I’ve had some issues building it so it won’t fail out here in space, but I think I’ve about gotten them all worked out.”

  “Thruster harness?”

  “Yeah, it’ll have thrusters positioned around your torso and knees with a joystick by your right hip. Twist the joystick to turn, tilt it back to tip up, slide it forward to move that direction, etc.”

  Wide-eyed, Bob said, “That’ll be awesome! We’ll be able to go out and recharge satellites that are running low on maneuvering fuel. We can use the thruster harness to fly over to them with the proverbial ‘can of gas.’”

  Nolan gave a self-deprecating little laugh, “I pictured myself flying from one satellite to another out here, but our little lesson in orbital mechanics earlier made me realize I don’t want to do that by the seat of my pants. Not unless Tiona invents me an endless supply of oxygen and a way to eat and go to the bathroom in my skin suit. Besides, it turns out that satellites are a lot further apart than I had them pictured in my mind!”

  Tiona looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, “Before anyone starts maneuvering using a thruster harness without safety straps, I’m going to ask my dad to do some more programming. We want the saucer’s AI to be able to find and approach objects using radar and orbital calculation. If we use seat-of-the-pants orbital maneuvering for distances of more than 100 feet we might actually manage to lose someone out here.”

  “No argument from me there.”

  Tiona turned back to Bob, “We won’t actually need to give satellites any maneuvering fuel. We can just stick a small set of maneuvering thrusters on them. Satellites won’t ever need to be refueled again.”

  Bob simply stared at her as his mind ran through the ramifications.

  ***

  Jong woke to incessant chiming from his AI. Irritated that his masters in Pyongyang had called him in the middle of his sleep cycle, he answered grumpily, “Yes?!”

  His heart leapt into his throat when he recognized the sound of the supreme leader’s voice. “Jong Wan Lee, I understand that Gettnor and his daughter escaped you in a flying car?”

  “Yes sir,” Jong responded apprehensively.

  “Well… we need flying cars here in your motherland don’t we?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “But it’s taking you a distressingly long time to carry out your mission, isn’t it?”

  “Yes sir,” Jong said, torn between wanting to explain the problems he’d had and his understanding that the supreme leader did not like excuses.

  To Jong’s surprise, the supreme Leader asked, “What is the problem?”

  “We only have a small team so we’ve been waiting to capture him and his daughter when they leave the house. Unfortunately, the man virtually never leaves his house.”

  “Well then, you need to go into his house and get him, don’t you?”

  “By report, he is well defended within his home. We may well fail without a bigger team.”

  “Hire some American criminals. Kill them afterward so they cannot tell tales.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I expect results Jong.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Soon.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And Jong?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “Make sure Wang and Tahm can’t talk to anyone.”

  “Yes sir,” Jong said with a heavy heart.

  ***

  Pete Costa walked out to the huge saucer in their construction hanger. The big door on the near side of the edge of the saucer was folded up into it so he suspected that Tiona Gettnor was still inside. He knocked on the frame of the saucer just inside the door, “Hello?”

  He didn’t hear an answer, so he stepped in through that door and then through the next opening. The door of the second opening was also folded up and inward, both of them held open by electric motors. He remembered asking Tiona about the design when he’d first looked at it. Her dad had designed it that way, she said, because in the case of a power failure they would fall shut under the influence of gravity if they were in a gravity field. They had to open inward so that air pressure would hold them shut when the saucer was exposed to vacuum.

  He’d been embarrassed to realize that he’d thought the design was inelegant.

  Pete walked down the entry hall to the living quarters in the middle of the big saucer, calling out every few steps, “Ms. Gettnor?”

  He heard her voice just as he entered the living quarters, “Over here.”

  He found her in what he thought of as the bridge or control room, though the big saucer could be controlled from anywhere using an AI. The small round room had big screens all over the walls and its dome-shaped ceiling. There were even screens curving down under a clear sapphire floor. Two chairs that could be converted to acceleration couches were bolted to the floor of the room. The idea was that from here it would be easier to see what was going on and decide what to do when you were controlling the saucer. Essentially, you could look at the screens almost as if you were looking right out of a window. The screens on the floor let you see out the cameras directly below the saucer, those on the ceiling showed what was straight above. The walls had screens for cameras that faced straight outward, as well as ones tilted somewhat upward and downward. “I heard the reactors were hooked up and you were running tests? Any problems?”

  “Mmm,” she said, sounding like she was concentrating. “The main thruster discs are working, but a couple of the lateral ones are showing a fault.”

  “By ‘lateral ones,’ do you mean the ones on the sides, or the ones in the front and back that push sideways?” Pete found it a little confusing to talk about the front and back of a round saucer, but early on they’d started using those designations just to communicate with one another. The entry hall from the airlock came in the “back” of the saucer and the two chairs in the control room faced the “front.”

  “The front and back ones that push sideways,” Tiona said.

  “Ah, I remember worrying about the power runs to those discs during construction.”

  Frowning, she looked up at him. “Was there a problem?”

  Pete found himself distracted by the piercing look in her clear blue eyes, “Um, no. But, you know the power run cables were manufactured to exactly the right length?”

  She nodded.

  “The one to the very front right disc and the one to the very back left disc, they both did reach, but they were really tight. They fit onto their posts, but it was a little bit of a struggle.” He shrugged, “Enough that the foreman came and got me to look at it.”

  Gettnor’s eyes dropped back down to the screen she’d been studying. “Those are the two discs that have problems,” she said pursing her lips. “Can we go look at those cable runs?”

  “Sure,” Pete said, turning to lead the way.

  They stepped through the little safety airlock from the living quarters out into the more peripheral part of the saucer. This was where everything else from the fusion plants, to life-support, to the hydraulics for the big manipulator arms on top of the saucer were located. He led her toward the
front first. Two rows of big three meter thruster discs stood vertically there. These discs could push the whole saucer to the left or right if they worked in concert with the similar row of discs at the back of the saucer, or they could rotate the saucer by working in opposition.

  As he took her to the disc at the front right which had been troubled by the tight cable, he said, “Really, as tight as your dad laid out all these cables, it’s amazing these two were the only ones that were hard to attach.”

  “Tight?”

  “Yeah, he had them manufactured to exact lengths that were always just barely long enough. Most engineers would have manufactured them to have a little slack in case they miscalculated the layout or some temperature induced contraction might cause problems.” He leaned down and pointed out the attachment of the power run in question, “See how the cable’s straining and barely reaches here? I’ll bet it isn’t making very good contact.”

  Tiona leaned down and examined it. “Yeah, it looks like the contact surface might be tilted slightly. Maybe it’s only making a partial contact.” She stood, “Let’s track it back and see if we can find a place where we could get it a little slack.”

  “My guys and I already did that a couple times, but let’s do it again. Waiting to get a new cable will slow your trials, right?”

  “Uh-huh,” she said following the cable along its guide back to toward the main controller. When she got there, she said, “It looks like it’s stretched tight everywhere, doesn’t it.”

  “Yeah, we might be able to do something to the connection to make it work, but if my life was going to depend on this machine, I’d want to have a cable that was the right length.”

  Tiona looked up at him with an odd grin, “I find myself conflicted. On the one hand, I don’t want to wait for a new cable. On the other hand, my dad never screws up and acts astonished when anyone else does. I’m kinda looking forward to telling him he ordered these two cables the wrong length.”

  Pete gave her a conspiratorial look, “I know what you mean. Most of the times when I argue with my mom she turns out to be right too. It’s really irritating. You want to look at the run to the back disc before we call him?”

  “Yeah, we’d better.”

  Having found the same issue with the run to the back disc, Tiona asked her AI to put in a call to her dad. “Hey dad, I’m here with Pete Costa. We’ve got a problem where two of the power cables to the lateral thruster discs are a little short and not making good contact. We need to order ones that are at least a centimeter longer.”

  She’d put the conversation on external speakers so that Pete could hear. What he expected to hear was Dr. Gettnor saying, “Really?” That was what Pete would probably have said if someone called him with a similar issue. A little conversation filler to let him have time to think about it. Instead, Gettnor said, “What’s the cable number?”

  Tiona said, “It’s the power run to the three meter vertical disc at the very front on the right. One of the lateral thruster set.”

  Gettnor said nothing.

  After a minute of silence had passed, Tiona said, “Can you look it up by knowing which cable it is?”

  Gettnor only repeated his earlier question, “What’s the cable number?”

  Tiona sighed, “You can’t look it up?” After a moment’s pause she sighed and started walking towards the disc in front that had the fault. “Never mind, where would I find the number?”

  “Printed on all four sides just before the origin and termination of the cable.”

  Tiona bent down to look at the termination of the cable, “It’s cable number 90326.”

  “That cable’s supposed to go to the left front disc. The right front disc should be 90328. They just misread the numbers.”

  The AI said, “Dr. Gettnor has disconnected.”

  Pete looked at Tiona thinking she’d be mad about how rude her dad had just been. Her eyes were closed and she had a frustrated look on her face. She opened her eyes and looked back down at the number again, “90326, but in this font the six and the eight are a little hard to tell apart.” She gave Pete a wry look as she started walking toward the front left disc, “One of these days…” She bent over to look at the number, but Pete could already see that the power run to that disc had more slack in it than any of the others. She said, “90328.” She shook her head, “One of these days, he’s gonna make an actual mistake and I won’t be left feeling like an idiot.” She turned to Pete, “I assume your team can switch those cables pronto? Then we should be able to do our trials.”

  Pete gave her a chagrined look, “I’ll get them right on it.” As he started quickly walking away he called back over his shoulder, “I sympathize with you. This is about the hundredth time we’ve thought he made a mistake but it turned out to be ours.”

  ***

  Stillman Davis rubbed his eyes. My life is shit, he thought. After his arrest for being involved in the kidnapping of Vaz Gettnor he’d spent a few years in prison. As a model prisoner, he’d been released early, but as a felon there were no decent jobs available. So, he worked for criminals. Bookkeeping, working numbers, developing business plans for criminal activities.

  His underworld associates felt like they paid him well, but by Stillman’s standards it wasn’t enough. He didn’t like what he did. He didn’t like constantly looking over his shoulder. He didn’t like having headaches from constantly staring at screens like he’d been doing all day today.

  And he still hated Vaz Gettnor.

  He also hated this Jong guy. Stillman wasn’t even sure whether Jong was Chinese. He thought he might be Korean. He worried sometimes about how Jong had found out about him and his connection to Gettnor. Still, if an Asian crime lord like Jong had taken an interest in Vaz Gettnor and was willing to pay Stillman to help do something that would cause Gettnor misery…

  Stillman was down with that.

  Unfortunately, Stillman hadn’t heard from Jong for a while. He worried that Jong had lost interest, but worried even more that Jong might have already captured Gettnor without Stillman’s help. A picture ran through Stillman’s mind of Gettnor shackled, caged, and loaded onto an airplane with Jong. In his mind’s eye, Jong hadn’t told Davis about it in order to avoid paying Stillman’s fee.

  Stillman was trying to work out a reasonable plan for determining whether Gettnor still lived in his house or had already been carried away by some kind of Asian bad guys when his AI interrupted him. “You have a call from Jong Wan Lee.”

  “I’ll take it… Hello.”

  “Hello,” Jong said in his flawless and accent free English. “I would like to meet with you where we first met. 10 o’clock.”

  “Okay,” Davis said. He didn’t ask whether it was ten in the morning or ten in the evening. He didn’t want anything incriminating recorded on his AI or perhaps extractable from the net. He assumed that it would be 10 o’clock at night because night was when they first met and when people doing Stillman’s kind of business normally met.

  Remembering how irritated Jong had been when he was a little bit late the first time, Stillman purposely showed up to open the passenger door of Jong’s car and get in at 10:05. “What do you need?”

  Jong stared at him for a few minutes and Stillman could feel the man’s anger. Finally, without expressing any of his anger, Jong took off his AI headset and made a show of turning it off. He indicated that Stillman should do the same, then flipped a switch on a box that filled the car with the sound of many people talking. He leaned closer to Stillman and said, “I need to hire some men.”

  “What kind of men?”

  “I don’t know what you call them. In the movies they call them ‘muscle.’ Strong men who aren’t squeamish and do what they’re told.”

  Davis gave a slight interrogative lift of his chin, “What do you want them to do?”

  “We’ve been waiting for Gettnor to leave his house. He never does. We’re going to have to go in after him.”

  Davis shook his head, �
�You’ve got to be crazy to do that. I’ve told you what happened to our team.”

  Jong said, “You don’t have to go with us. We’re going to use a bigger team and subdue him with drugs. Even you got him out of the house; you just didn’t keep him in control.”

  Davis ignored the dig implied by the “even you.” Instead he rubbed his chin as if he were considering the issues, then said, “It’ll be expensive.”

  They settled down to negotiating a price.

  ***

  Jake flicked off his novel when the nurse walked into the room. Guarding a comatose patient on the graveyard shift was so boring that Jake found even the entrance of a male nurse worth looking up for. It was stupid anyway. It wasn’t like this comatose guy was going to get up and run away. The nurse was a middle-aged Asian guy in an immaculate white nursing uniform. A lot of the nurses wore ordinary clothes which made it a little hard to tell that they were really nurses. This guy looked much more professional. He injected some medication into the comatose guy’s IV, spoke a notation to his AI and left the room.

  Jake had turned his novel back on and read another paragraph before one of the damned alarms went off. It seemed like one alarm or another was going off all the damn time. Probably one of the IV bags had run out or something like that. He was trying to look at the bags to see if he could spot an empty one when he heard a similar sounding alarm go off in the next room. The room where they had the other Asian.

  That’s a weird coincidence, Jake thought.

  Then a female nurse ran into the room looking upset. She picked up the guy’s wrist and held it while she stared at the monitor for a moment. She said, “Shit! AI, call in a code blue for this room!” She dropped the rail on the bed and climbed up on it. Putting the heels of her hands on the man’s chest, she started pumping up and down.

  Jake got to his feet and looked at the wide eyes of his partner who’d just stepped inside the door. His first thought was about all the reports they were going to have to fill out over this, then he said, “Asian guy, white nursing uniform. He injected something in this dude’s IV. Since I saw him, I’ll grab Jonas and go after him. You and Gomez stay here with the two gorks. Call headquarters and get them to put out an APB.”