Disc (18 page)

Nolan looked at Mrs. Gettnor where she sat beside the bed, “How are you holding up?”

“Okay, I guess. You didn’t get hurt, did you?”

“No, I’m fine.” Saying that, Nolan remembered Tiona rubbing her foot and limping a little while they waited for the ambulance. He looked at her with concern, “How’s your foot?”

“I think it’s a damned good thing I had on boots!” She shrugged, “I don’t think it’s broken, but maybe I should go get it x-rayed.”

A knock came at the door. When Tiona answered it, a policeman stepped inside. He told Mrs. Gettnor that the police had been over all the AI recordings of what happened and had determined that the two Asian men were the aggressors. He looked at Nolan and Tiona, “So, you guys aren’t under any suspicion, but we’re hoping you can give us some idea what those guys wanted?”

Tiona frowned, “What do
they
say?”

“We have no idea, one’s still unconscious. The other one’s at least pretending to have had a serious head injury and acting like he can’t talk.” The policeman cleared his throat uncomfortably, “Um, the docs aren’t sure the first guy’ll ever wake up.”

With a tight expression, Tiona said, “Well, I can’t really say I’m sorry about their condition. We don’t know what they were after either. We invented something pretty significant recently. Maybe they’re after that?”

It looked like a light went on in the policeman’s brain, “
Oh
… you’re the girl with the flying saucer, aren’t you?

***

Jong cursed. Wang had never said anything else on the comm after he’d told Jong that they’d found Gettnor. By the time the other members of the team reached the spot it was crawling with police and ambulances. Yun had driven slowly past and thought he’d seen Wang and Tahm being loaded into ambulances. Gettnor senior hadn’t been visible, but an ambulance had been pulling away when Yun went by, so Yun thought Gettnor may have been in that vehicle. Gettnor’s daughter had been standing beside the BMW talking to the police.

What am I going to do?
Jong wondered.
I’ve lost two members of my small team and I have
nothing
to show for it. The Gettnors will be on guard now!
It was coming up on evening in North Carolina and morning in Korea so they would be expecting his call soon.
Is there any way I can make this sound like less of a disaster?

He decided to talk up the flying car. A flying car was just the sort of technological toy that would excite their supreme leader.
Like distracting a cat from a mouse with a laser pointer,
he thought.

***

Tiona told the BMW to stop at the hospital entrance. She waved at her parents and they started her way. Her dad got in the back, so her mother got into the passenger seat. Tiona told the car to take them back to her parents’ house, then turned to her dad, “How are you feeling?”

“Fine.”

Lisanne said, "Fine except he's been going crazy in there.” She snorted, “No lab to work in, you know?”

Tiona could imagine. Talk about a recipe for putting her dad on edge. An unfamiliar place, filled with unfamiliar people, where he couldn’t focus on things that mattered to him. She turned back to her dad, “Did you do some programming?”

Her dad nodded. Her mother snorted, “Did he do some programming? Every freaking moment, even while the doctors were trying to talk to him.”

Tiona grinned at her mother. “You knew he was this way when you married him,” she said in a singsong voice, repeating a mantra they’d all heard a million times.

Lisanne grinned back. “Yes I did,” she said turning to look fondly back at her husband.

Tiona said, “Dad, how did you know that guy was going to pull a Taser on you?”

“I didn’t.”

“Oh, come on. You’d stopped and wrapped your belt around your hand. You were expecting to hit them, weren’t you?”

Her dad didn’t say anything for a while, so she turned to look at him in the back seat. He had a mulish expression on his face, but said nothing.

Tiona’s AI said, “You have a call from General Cooper.”

“I’ll take it… Hello General, what can I do for you?”

The general sounded a little distracted, “We’ve got a problem…”

When Cooper didn’t say anything further, Tiona’s heart skipped a beat worrying that something bad might be happening. Maybe General Harding had gotten loose?

Before Tiona asked Cooper to clarify, he continued, “Space Command launched a multibillion-dollar satellite this morning. The second stage of the launch vehicle has failed multiple attempts to ignite it.”

“And it didn’t reach orbit?” Tiona asked.

“It’s in orbit, but it’s very low.”

“How long till it burns up?”

There was a pause, Tiona suspected Cooper was checking with someone. When he spoke again, he said, “3 to 5 days… we think.”

“And you’re hoping we can tow it up to the orbit it’s supposed to be in?”

“Um, yeah.”

Tiona didn’t say anything for a minute while she considered. There were probably hundreds of questions she should ask the general. “Does it have an attachment point we can clamp on to?”

Cooper said, “Yeah, there is a suspension ring at the front end that was used to hold up the frame during construction and to move it from place to place including while they were mounting it on the rocket.”

“Can you detach the satellite from the upper stage? I’m not sure we want to try to grapple and move it while it’s still attached to something that’s a lot like a bomb.”

“We should be able to, but we haven’t tried to detach it yet. If you’re going to try to move it, then we can send the signal to detach it. If you aren’t willing to try, we’d like to keep trying to ignite the second stage.”

“Well, to be honest, I see lots of problems. The saucer we’ve currently got flying wasn’t really built to be doing this kind of thing. We’re still assembling one that’s been designed from the ground up for moving things around out in space, but it probably won’t be ready to fly for another week or two.”

“I thought the one you already had could generate 100,000 pounds of thrust?”

“It can, but I don’t want to be sitting in the cabin while it’s pushing against your satellite with its upper windows. It’d ruin my day if those windows broke. There aren’t really any attachment points on the bottom for cables to use to tow something either.” She paused for a moment, then had another thought, “Besides, remember we’ve mostly been flying this thing by the seat of our pants. I’m not sure we can find something whizzing along in a low orbit like that, nor am I sure we’d know how to move it into the right orbit.”

Vaz spoke up from the back seat, “The AI can do it. Orbital mechanics are really simple problems for an AI like that and in Earth orbit you’ll have GPS for precision location.”

Cooper started to speak to Tiona, but she said, “Just a second General, my dad’s had some ideas.” She turned frowning to her dad in the back seat, “You know what we’re talking about? You’ve only heard my half of the conversation.”

Vaz shrugged and spoke in a monotone, “Something didn’t reach a good orbit; it’s going to burn up sometime soon; they want you to tow it up to a better orbit; you’re not sure whether you can find it or put it in the right orbit.”

Tiona gave a little laugh, “I guess you heard enough. How would you suggest we attach the saucer to the satellite? I’m not real excited about having it trailing behind us on a cable and maybe smashing into us if we maneuver.”

Vaz looked at her for a moment, then said, “You could bolt a gripping arm to the bottom of the fusion plant under the saucer. Strong enough to either push or pull.”

“How would you activate the gripper? Whatever you use has to stand up to a space environment.”

“Electromagnet, the saucer has power to spare.”

Tiona frowned, “What if this attachment ring is nonmagnetic?”

“The magnet doesn’t attach to the satellite, the magnet opens a gripper device that springs back shut to mechanically grasp the attachment ring.”

“Okaaay,” Tiona closed her eyes for a moment thinking, then said, “General, my dad thinks we can do it. Can you give us precision data on the orbit and exact dimensions for this ring we’re going to attach to? We’d want to grip it rather than just clipping onto it with a tow cable.”

“Sure! We even have a replica of the satellite that you can try attaching the grip to.”

“Yeah… unless that replica’s here in North Carolina, it’s probably just as easy for us to try attaching to the one that’s out in space.”

“Sorry, still thinking old school. Too used to doing everything we can down here on Earth because it’s so hard to get to space.”

“Okay, have somebody send me exact dimensions so we can build something to grip it. I’ll contact you for exact orbital elements when we’re ready to go up.”

“Um, thanks. Uh, how much is this going to cost? Our bean counters are going to want to know.”

Tiona gave a little laugh, “Well, I’d have to ask my brother the CEO since I’m not the business person in our group. But, how about if
I
promise we won’t charge more than one percent of the cost of the satellite?”

“That’d be over $30 million!” Cooper sounded a little indignant.

“And a
lot
cheaper than letting it burn up in the atmosphere. Do you want us to proceed or no?”

“But it isn’t going to cost you anywhere near that much!”

“Ah, but we have
all
these startup costs. You can bet my businessman brother is going to think I’m letting you off
way
too cheap.”

“Yeah,” Cooper sighed, “and you’re right, it’s
way
cheaper than building another satellite. I think you can assume you’ve got the go-ahead though I’ll have to confirm with the bean counters.”

Tiona laughed, “You might have more trouble than you expect. We’re not on their list of ‘approved vendors.’ You
know
that satellite’s going to be drifting ash before they get done dithering about using an unapproved vendor.”

Cooper sighed again, sounding depressed, “Yeah.”

Tiona snickered, “Tell you what. We’ll save
this
satellite whether we get paid or not, but you tell them after they get done putting it out for competitive bids and realize we’re
really
cheap compared to all the people out there who can’t do it at all, that they’ll want to pay us what we charge for this one. Otherwise, we’ll charge
five
percent for any satellite rescues in the future.”

Cooper agreed to the plan. She reminded him to send her the dimensions for the attachment point, then disconnected.

***

Bob Thompson shook his head. It’d only been an hour since he’d called Sophie to tell her that the new skin suits were ready. Apparently she’d been in Raleigh at the new GSI headquarters, so she, Tiona, and Nolan had jumped in the saucer then flown out immediately to try them on. He watched the saucer slow as it came down behind his house.

As they walked back into his house to try out their suits, Bob said, “Why such a rush?”

Sophie said, “We have our first mission and we’re flying it tonight. We’re hoping that at least one of these suits will fit well enough that we can have someone do an EVA if we need it.”

“What kind of mission? I thought you guys were trying to go to the moon, surely you’re not trying to do that
tonight
?”

“No, no, Space Command has had a second stage failure while launching one of their satellites. They’re hoping we can take it the rest of the way up before it deorbits.”

Jokingly he said, “You’re not gonna have someone get out there and give it a shove are you?”

Tiona Gettnor said, “We’re having our engineering firm build us a fixture for the saucer that’ll let us grab it. Hopefully we can attach with the fixture and tow it into the new orbit without any EVA, but I’m worried that it might need a little hands-on.”

They split up to put on the spandex garments that went under the skin suits. They split up into separate bedrooms to do that, but then they all rejoined in his family room to climb into their electroactive polymer suits.

Bob found the appearance of the two young ladies in spandex to be pretty distracting.

Soon enough they’d relaxed the polymer in their skin suits and began climbing into them. They took turns checking each other’s suits for wrinkles. Once they thought they had them on fairly straight, they turned down the juice to the polymers and re-smoothed out wrinkles with the suits moderately tight. Finally, they turned off the power completely so the polymers fully tightened. They did some twisting and turning to make sure they had freedom of movement, then put on their boots and coveralls and headed out to the saucer. The saucer took them up to altitude while maintaining 100 percent O2 atmosphere. They ate a little dinner and then started trying on their helmets.