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  While they all stood around looking stunned, the young woman said brightly, “Can we take you for a ride?”

  Mullins found himself being herded a little like a sheep into the passenger seat of the BMW. A couple of his engineers got in the back and Hammersmith got in the driver’s seat. “How do we get out onto your test track?” she asked.

  They gave her directions and a couple of minutes later she pulled out onto the track. “If you don’t mind,” she said, “I’ll drive it manually. That way I can give you a feel for the acceleration since the AI wouldn’t push the system hard.”

  Mullins said, “Sure,” but then was surprised to see her steering it with a joystick on the center console rather than using the wheel. Once she pulled out onto the track, she shoved the joystick ahead and a good solid punch of acceleration pushed them back into their seats. Mullins glanced back over his shoulder at Rich Carter and saw the engineer looking surprised. He turned to Hammersmith and said, “Why a joystick instead of the steering wheel and accelerator?”

  Hammersmith turned to him with a sly smile. “‘Cause the joystick lets me do this,” she said, pulling up on it.

  Mullins muttered, “Keeeryst!” as his stomach fell. The car lifted up in the air and swung out over the infield of the track while Mullins white-knuckled the grip of the armrest.

  Back in the building, still feeling discombobulated, Mullins and his team listened to a brief presentation from Dante Gettnor. “I’m sure you gentlemen realize that the future of personal transportation is going to be radically changed in the very near future. I assume that Ford would like to lead this change rather than be swept under by it. Because you haven’t had long to think about it let me outline a few of the things that I believe will happen in the near future.

  “At first, cars will continue to run on streets, but will be powered by fusors and thrusters. The government will need to be petitioned to provide low-level airspace for flight capable cars before they can become popular. Rules will need to be laid out regarding what direction you can travel at each of a number of preset altitudes and to designate locations where cars will be allowed to rise to such traveling altitudes. ‘No-fly zones’ will need to be blocked off and all of these rules will need to be programmed into vehicular AIs. We do not believe that individuals should be allowed to fly their cars manually except in certain restricted areas for sport.”

  Gettnor only spoke for about five minutes. When he paused for questions, Mullins said, “This is a lot to take in. We’ll need some samples of the technology to evaluate and some time to consider this at length.”

  Gettnor gave him a grin, “Yeah, that could be a problem. Rachel can stay with you for two days while you run this car through its paces. You can look for hidden motors and batteries, measure the power output and the actual thrust. But, then we’re going to be showing it to some of your competitors. You’ll need to make some kind of an offer for the rights to this tech. This will be for use of the thruster and fusor tech in personal vehicles, on the road and for low altitude transportation. Aircraft companies are already bidding on the use of this for commercial transportation, both of people and goods.”

  Mullins gazed at Gettnor for a minute, then, his eyes intense, he said, “What if we want to bid on commercial transportation too?”

  Gettnor gave him a steady look, “You’d need to make more than just a large bid. You’d need to convince us that your company is capable of doing business in that sector.”

  Mullins wondered how the tables had gotten turned. He’d expected to hold the whip hand at this meeting. This young punk was supposed to be begging Mullins to take an interest in his technology—Mullins wasn’t supposed to have to beg for access to it!

  ***

  Gettnor Space Industries, Raleigh, North Carolina — GSI announced today that their new large “saucer” has, at NASA’s request, attached a towing rig to asteroid Kadoma. This is the same asteroid on which astronauts Abbot and White became stranded when they first attempted to modify its orbit. When GSI’s first saucer rescued Abbot and White, it also finished modifying Kadoma’s orbit to send it closer to earth. Now, GSI’s big saucer is performing a second modification of Kadoma’s trajectory to actually place it in orbit around the earth. There NASA hopes to use it as a resource for space activities.

  Raj Mehta, NASA’s spokesman said, “Kadoma represents almost 3600 metric tons of material including metals, carbonaceous materials, and various frozen volatiles. These represent an invaluable resource for space research, construction, and manufacturing.”

  GSI’s team, which harnessed Kadoma in a network of Kevlar cables during a series of spacewalks, is also harvesting samples from Kadoma. NASA hopes to use these samples to understand exactly what resources will now be available to them.

  As in the past, when Kadoma-related activities have made the news, quite a few protests have developed at NASA facilities. These are by groups who are concerned that NASA will make a mistake and crash Kadoma into the earth. Mr. Mehta has tried to reassure them that these concerns are unfounded, but…

  Worried about more attacks from the unnamed group that had assaulted them, Tiona had taken to staying in her old room at her parents’ house. Lisanne greatly enjoyed having her there, but really didn’t like having the guards Tiona’d hired wandering around their place.

  She called Tiona and Vaz to dinner. When they had arrived and been served, she brought it up. “Do you guys think we still need those guards?”

  Vaz shook his head, “No.”

  Tiona’s eyes widened, “Yes! They aren’t causing any trouble are they?”

  They weren’t, in fact, very intrusive. They stayed in the kitchen and family room of the Johnson house next door. From there they walked regular patrols around both houses. Lisanne said reluctantly, “Well, I guess not. It’s just the thought of having these guys walking around our house all the time. It gives me the creeps.”

  “That’s more creepy than having a bunch of people burst into your house and start kidnapping us?!” Tiona said, tugging on the emotional strings of their family’s previous kidnapping years ago.

  “Surely we’re not going to have to live with guards for the rest of our lives, are we?” Lisanne asked.

  Tiona said, “It hasn’t been very long since those guys tried to kidnap Dad! It’s not like you’ve had to put up with guards for years or something.”

  Lisanne turned to Vaz, “Vaz, you disagree with Tiona? You don’t think we need guards?”

  Vaz’s eyes flickered back and forth from Lisanne to Tiona to Lisanne and back. Then, without saying anything, he put down his silverware, wiped his face, got up, and headed back to his basement.

  Lisanne sighed, “That’s your dad for you. Always avoiding conflict.”

  “Unless he can punch it in the face,” Tiona said quietly.

  ***

  Tiona and Dante sat down at the conference room at GSI’s headquarters near Costa and Sons. Pete Costa was there as were Sophie, Bob Thompson, two engineers from Costa and Sons, and several more ex-astronauts who’d decided to join GSI. The plan was to rough out a space station that GSI could use for microgravity research, orbital manufacturing and space construction. Though Tiona had not expected to be successful, she’d tried to get her dad to come to the meeting. He’d obstinately refused, but after quite a bit of cajoling, had agreed to listen in on the meeting and offer suggestions through Tiona.

  Dante brought the meeting to order, setting out their objectives which were to build a safe shirtsleeves-environment in a microgravity orbit. They expected to do so in a low Earth orbit where the planet’s magnetosphere would deflect much of the radiation present in space.

  “What if we put it in the same orbit as the space station? Then we could support them if they had a problem and vice versa. It’s an orbit that allows observation of a lot of the Earth’s surface and one where the government would give us warnings if space debris might be about to hit us.”

  Tiona said, “I guess we can see
what NASA thinks about it. It sounds good to me, but there might be some reason they wouldn’t like it.”

  “I’ve been thinking that we need to build it with a rotating ring,” Pete Costa said. One of the big issues with the current space station is how sick it makes people to stay out there in microgravity for a long time. If they slept, ate, and lived in a ring that was spun up to provide pseudo-gravity we could avoid a lot of those problems.” He glanced around at the others, “I bring it up now because NASA might object to having a large rotating object so close to their space station. If we were to have a mechanical failure and pieces flew off, it could be a big problem for them.”

  Sophie said, “A ring-shaped station has to be pretty damn big. You don’t want it to spin faster than about two revolutions per minute or Coriolis forces mess with your inner ears. To generate one gravity at two rpm, the diameter of your ring would need to be about 450 meters, which means that the circumference would be 1.4 kilometers. Now I know the big saucer can lift some large objects into space, but we’re talking some major construction here. We might not want to start with that.”

  Tiona said, “I think most of you know my dad’s listening in on this meeting even though he didn’t want to come to it. He’s pointed out to me that the ISS orbits at about 250 miles. It’ll only take about twenty minutes to get to that altitude in a saucer. He says if people want to work in microgravity, but live and sleep at one G, the most obvious solution is to commute back to Earth.”

  There was a pause in the conversation while the people there gave each other startled looks, then Bob Thompson laughed, “We’re all too used to thinking of a trip to orbit as horribly expensive and dangerous. It’s gonna take us a while to get used to this new reality. It sounds like what he’s suggesting is we should build a microgravity facility first. Maybe after we’ve learned to manufacture things in space we could build a ring for pseudo-gravity. Maybe even a bigger one than Sophie just described.”

  Pete Costa gave a self-deprecating laugh, “Yeah, that seems pretty obvious in retrospect. Well then, my thoughts on the microgravity station were that we could build some large boxes that the big saucer could lift out to orbit. My initial rough calculations suggested that we could build a 25 meter cube, divided up into some big rooms and have it come in with a weight of 2000 to 2500 metric tons. That’s within the limits of what the big saucer could haul up there.”

  Bob Thompson looked like he was concentrating, “What would you build it out of?”

  “Aluminum, with layered Kevlar over the outside for meteor protection. I’m thinking that the surrounding Kevlar should be set up so that it could be filled with water for radiation protection and even better, meteor protection. Then if, with every trip a saucer made up, it carried water to fill out its load capacity, you could use that to gradually fill the Kevlar bags.”

  “Hmm, a twenty-five meter cube doesn’t sound all that big.”

  “Twenty-five meters is 80 feet. That’s like an eight story building, with each floor having about 6700 square feet. It’d total up to about 53,000 square feet of floor space. I know there’s no such thing as a floor in space, but it gives you a comparison to buildings here on earth that we’re familiar with. 53,000 square feet’s nothing to sniff at. Some of the spaces should be a lot more than ten feet high and quite a bit of space would be lost to life-support and passageways; nonetheless it’d be pretty big.”

  “You mentioned having it divided up into rooms. Wouldn’t it be better to make it one big space and let the users partition it off with fabric screens if they needed to?”

  “It’d be a more rigid structure if it had dividing walls. Besides, if it gets punctured by a meteoroid, you wouldn’t want the whole thing to decompress at once.”

  “Ah—good point.”

  The discussion went on for some time, then broke up with a laundry list of questions to be answered. Everyone was urged to come up with their own design to be discussed at the next meeting.

  ***

  Nick looked away from his novel when his AI chimed at him. It said, “Larry is five minutes late on his check in.”

  Annoyed, Nick said, “Connect me to Larry… Larry, you asshole, check in. You’re throwing off our count!” He looked at the screen which displayed both the guards’ expected location as well as their latest check in on their rounds. Larry was supposed to be on the far side of the Gettnors’ house. Marvin—the other guard on duty that night—should have been on the near side of Gettnors’. “Larry, Goddammit, check in!”

  Still no answer. Nick waited a beat, then said, “Marv, go check on Larry. He’s forgotten to check in. Maybe his AI’s dropped its connection or something.”

  Marv didn’t respond either.

  A frisson of ice water shot through Nick and he lumbered to his feet, eyes scanning over the screens showing infrared images of the yard. He didn’t see anything. Protocol said he was supposed to call in to the main guard service if his rovers didn’t check in. Nick dithered though, thinking that they were a pair of screw ups, but they were friends and he didn’t want them to get in trouble.

  Nick walked over to the door, intending to scan the yard with his own eyes. When he opened it, to his astonishment, he saw a small man on the porch, dressed in black.

  The man lifted an arm.

  Nick saw a gun.

  I should have put on my vest, he thought, starting to jerk away.

  Nick heard a sound like a loud cough and felt a thump on his chest.

  I should have put on my vest, he thought again…

  Jong heard Cho’s voice in his ear piece, “Guards all dead.” Relief washed over Jong. His research had shown that the guards Gettnor had hired came from a security company. That company provided low-quality guards to a number of businesses around town. Two of the ones on duty tonight were overweight and only one had finished high school. They should have been easy to take out, especially for someone with Cho’s skills, but if anyone knew how many things could go wrong with a complex plan like this, it was Jong. He spoke to his AI, “Connect me to all team members… We are go. I repeat, we are go.”

  Jong brought up the seat of his car and looked out the window toward Gettnor’s house. The two vans pulled up, one into the Gettnors’ driveway and the other into the driveway of the neighboring house that Gettnor used as a garage for his saucer. Men in black poured silently out of the two vehicles and ran, some toward the side of Gettnor’s house, and some to guard all the known exits.

  A man in the group at the side of the house outlined a window with a glass cutter. Large suction cups were quickly applied and the pane of the window was popped out, hopefully without much noise. One of them climbed through.

  Two of the men at the side of the house had knelt over the power meter. When they stood back up and also climbed through the window, Jong assumed they’d succeeded in cutting the power.

  Two more were working on the fiber-optic connection to the internet. They also stood and climbed through the window into the house.

  Jong’s first intimation that things weren’t going according to plan came when the lights switched on upstairs. The bastard must have his own power generator!

  Lisanne woke when Vaz suddenly sat up in the bed and told the AI to turn on the lights. He reached out and shook her, “Lisanne, get up. Someone’s broken into the house. Go to the basement, I’ll get Tiona.”

  Vaz got up and stumped across the room, moving quickly. Lisanne leapt out of bed, resisted her impulse to go to the bathroom first, and ran for the stairs instead.

  Her father banging open the door to her bedroom woke Tiona. “Someone’s broken in. Put on your shoes.” He was at the window cranking it open.

  Tiona had taken to wearing pajama pants and a T-shirt to bed when she’d started sleeping at home again. She swung her feet over the side of the bed and pushed them into her running shoes. As soon as she stood, Vaz jerked the sheet off her bed. “Go out the window and run for help. They’ve cut off communications.” He handed her the end
of the sheet.

  Holding onto the sheet she peered out the window “I can’t jump that far!”

  “Hold on to the sheet. I’ll lower you.”

  Tiona gave him a startled look, then remembered how powerful his arms were. She crouched on the windowsill and took a good grip on the sheet. At first she thought she would lean out the window, place her feet against the wall and walk backward down it like she was rappelling. Vaz interrupted that by stepping forward, saying, “Hold on,” and giving her a little shove.

  Tiona tumbled out the window holding to the sheet with desperate strength. She found herself being swiftly lowered to the ground. She glanced up at her dad in the poor lighting. Lowering her effortlessly!

  Tiona’s feet struck the ground and her dad’s head disappeared back inside the window. She turned to run and fell to the ground spasming. Taser! she thought, remembering the feel of the Taser years ago when the family had been kidnapped. Hurts just the same.

  Someone dressed in black knelt beside her. Tiona felt a needle puncture her thigh; then the man picked her up and threw her over his shoulder.

  As her world slipped away, she wondered what had happened to the guards she’d hired.

  Vaz pounded down the stairs, but as he burst into the family room and turned toward the stairs to his basement, he saw seven men standing there looking at him. They were all dressed in black and pointing weapons at him.