Disc (20 page)

“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.”

***

Liz Costa stood watching the big saucer. They’d been testing the fusion plants one at a time, running the power into the main lifting disc. As she’d heard with the first five plants they’d tested, a low pitched, almost subliminal, rumble gradually became noticeable. About the time she was really sure she was hearing it, the saucer lifted gently off the ground. It rose up to a couple of feet and then gradually settled back to the ground. Apparently, with the power from just one of the six 125 megawatt fusion plants, the saucer could lift 1.6 million pounds. Since the saucer itself only weighed a million pounds, it could easily lift itself out to orbit on just that one plant. The other fusion plants insured against failure since the saucer could return and land with only one plant still functioning. They also allowed the big workhorse saucer to lift much greater loads to orbit.

They had already pressurized the living quarters and, separately, the entire saucer to ten atmospheres. They had, as Liz had expected, found a couple of small leaks, but they’d been quickly sealed. They’d tested the big manipulator arms on top of the saucer, having each of them lift and move a ten metric ton weight. Next was the test that made her the most nervous. They were going to fly the saucer down to Wilmington where they’d found a 2,700 ton displacement ship that was due to be scrapped. The owners had agreed to have it cabled up, floated out to sea a ways, and then let them try to lift it out of the water with the saucer. Even though their engineering formulas said the saucer
could
do it, 2,700 tons was a helluva load!