Disc (27 page)

Kim grinned at her for a moment and Tiona remembered seeing a story that he’d been educated in Switzerland. Probably he was used to Westerners looking him in the eye. Then Kim turned his eyes on Vaz and frowned.

Tiona looked at her father and saw that he sat at his computer. He was mumbling to it and striking his typical rapid key combinations. Tiona only briefly wondered if her dad was doing this to piss Kim off, then realized that Vaz probably had no idea who Kim was.

Kim walked over to Vaz and stood there for a second, evidently expecting Vaz to look up or otherwise respond to his presence.

Vaz kept working.

Kim cleared his throat.

Vaz kept working.

Kim’s face clouded and Tiona worried the man was about to lash out, but then his expression smoothed. In cultured English he said, “Dr. Gettnor, what are you working on?”

Without looking up, Vaz said, “You guys want a flying car. I’m working on how to build one in this piece of crap country.” He immediately resumed mumbling to his AI.

A muscle twitched in Kim’s jaw and out of the corners of her eyes Tiona could see the other men in the room flinch. After a moment, Kim said in a menacingly quiet voice, “Dr. Gettnor,
I’m
the
supreme
leader of this great country you’re calling a ‘piece of crap.’”

Vaz looked up at him, “Are you the one that had us kidnapped?” Tiona could tell her father was angry, though Vaz’s typically expressionless delivery probably meant that Kim wouldn’t know it.

Kim said, “Yes.
And
, I’m the one who will have you and your daughter
killed
if you don’t deliver.”

Vaz turned back to his computer, “Well then, I’d better keep working.”

“You do that,” Kim said. He turned and stalked from the room.

As soon as Kim was gone, the guards and their two keepers deflated from their rigid postures.

Khang stormed to Vaz’s side, “What you doing?! You not to talk to supreme leader that way!”

Vaz ignored him. A moment later Khang reached down and grabbed Vaz by the shirt. Tiona had had her eye on the door where Kim had exited, so she didn’t see exactly what happened, but the next thing she knew, Khang was lying on the floor clutching his stomach and gasping for breath. She thought her father had hit him in the stomach, but Vaz had turned back to his computer and was continuing to work as if nothing had happened.

Jiao came over to Tiona and said, “You must talk to your father! He
not
hit people! You know he break Chin’s liver?! Chin have much surgery and still nearly die!”

Tiona was pretty sure that Chin was the name of the keeper that Vaz had punched in the stomach that first day. Though she felt a little dismay that Chin had been so badly injured, she kept her gaze steady on Jiao’s eyes. She said, “Maybe you people shouldn’t have kidnapped us. Maybe your supreme leader shouldn’t be threatening to kill us if we don’t build him a flying car.” She turned away and muttered, “Assholes,” in a quiet tone that she nonetheless felt sure was loud enough that they could clearly hear it.

About forty-five minutes later, Vaz got up and walked over to the pH meter. After a few minutes, he turned to say, “Tiona, I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong with the pH meter. Can I show you?”

Puzzled, Tiona got up and walked over to where her father was examining the pH meter. As soon as she bent over it, he quietly said, “Do you know if that guy was really the leader of their country?”

Tiona replied just as quietly, “Yes.”

“It doesn’t seem like the government he’s running is… very good.”

“No, it’s horribly oppressive, giving the people virtually no freedom. Anyone who objects is sent to labor camps where they’re regularly beaten and frequently starve to death.”

“And he knows about this?”

“Yes, the leadership of this country under his family’s dynasty has resulted in increasing tyranny and persecution with each subsequent generation.”

“I thought he seemed like a bad man.”

“Yes, he’s… awful. He executes people all the time, frequently by shooting them in the head with his own gun. But he’s had them thrown out of airplanes and shot with cannons. He’s killed entire families, one at a time, starting with the children while the parents are forced to watch. You really don’t want to make him angry.”

“No…” Vaz said, reflectively, “but it
would
be good to kill him and destroy his government,” Vaz said. He turned and walked back to his computer.

Tiona felt a little sprinkle of goosebumps run up her back as she watched him go.
Would that be murder,
she wondered,
killing someone who most people believe deserves the death penalty?

***

When she woke up in the morning, Lisanne found a window open on the screen in the kitchen. It was typical of the ones Vaz used to send her messages. It said, “I and Tiona are okay. We’re being treated okay.” She stared at these two somewhat redundant statements for a moment, then realized that he’d—very objectively—answered the two questions she had posed when she’d received his first message.

Vaz had then skipped a few lines and said, “We’re in North Korea. Yes.” Suspecting that these were answers to the questions Cooper’d had her pose later, she asked her AI to put Cooper’s questions back up so that she could review them. Cooper had asked for Vaz’s location and whether he could communicate securely with her. She stared at the two answers in some frustration. She’d certainly hoped that he would specify his location more exactly than just “North Korea.” Evidently, he felt fairly certain he could communicate securely. He hadn’t responded at all to Cooper’s third request for “any other information.” She looked at the way she’d posed the question and realized with some frustration that the wording was far too nebulous for her husband’s black or white world view. She should never have expected him to extemporaneously describe the situation he and Tiona found themselves in, whether Cooper had asked her to pose such a question or not.

Preparing to answer Vaz, she told her AI to go to the end of the message in the window. When it did she realized a little bit of Vaz’s message extended out of the bottom of the window. It said, “Tiona asks you to tell Nolan she’s okay. She also said to tell General Cooper where we are.”

Looking back through the questions and their responses led her to wonder whether Vaz had answered “North Korea” because that’s as close as he knew his location, or if that’s the degree of specificity he thought she’d been looking for. She thought for a while, then wrote out some questions that she thought might generate more useful answers. “Please tell me your location, as exactly as you can give it. How big is the building you’re being kept in? Are you in that building day and night, or do they move you to a different building to sleep? How many guards do they have watching you? Are there also guards outside the building you’re being kept in? What kind of weapons are the guards armed with? Our government is trying to negotiate your freedom, but might try to send someone over there to break you out. I love you. Please give Tiona my love and Nolan’s as well.” Lisanne felt a little guilty about this, because she hadn’t actually spoken to Nolan yet, but she felt sure he wanted to give Tiona his love.

She read over the message, feeling that it didn’t seem very loving. But she worried if she sent him a message with the kind of flowery wording that would express her emotional state it would only lead to confusion. The simple questions she’d posed were the kind of communication that worked best with Vaz.

***

Tiona got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom. She hated doing this because the night guards’ eyes tracked her trip across the room to the bathroom. The Koreans had removed the doors from
all
the rooms though they’d allowed her to hang a sheet as a privacy curtain over the bathroom door. The bathroom itself was filthy when they arrived and had only become clean because she had demanded supplies and cleaned it herself.

She supposed that walking across the room to the bathroom with the guards watching shouldn’t be particularly creepy since they could look in her open door and watch her sleeping when they made their rounds. That bothered her, but for some reason not as much as walking to the bathroom in the night and then having to use it with only the thin curtain over the door.

She hated the food too.

She hated not being at home, not seeing Nolan, not seeing her friends, not seeing her mother, wondering what was going on with GSI, not having any music, the list went on…

On the way back to her own tiny room she glanced into the room where her father slept. Just like every other time she’d passed his room, he had his HUD on. She wondered if he was actually awake programming, and if so, what in the world he could be spending so much time on. He’d never slept long hours at home, but if he was really working on his HUD as much as she thought, he was going to exhaust himself. Besides, he could whip out programs in a few hours that took other people weeks. Designing discs just didn’t take complex programming so she wondered what he was actually doing.

As she climbed back into bed, she decided that he must just be sleeping in his HUD with it inactive or set up to cancel sound. Or maybe he had it play some kind of soothing audio for him?

***

New York Times, New York, New York – We have learned today that Dr. Vaz Gettnor and his daughter Tiona Gettnor have been kidnapped. The Gettnors were recently in the news for their role in the rescue of astronauts White and Abbott from asteroid Kadoma. Tiona Gettnor worked in the lab at UNC where the technology for the saucer was developed and she was on the saucer during its mission. Her father is apparently the one who built the saucer.

An unnamed but authoritative source claims that the Gettnors were kidnapped in an effort to obtain the saucer technology. Further, he stated that the loss of the Gettnors represents a technological tragedy for the United States. The source said that there is good evidence that they were captured and removed from our country by a sovereign power, specifically North Korea.

Initial queries addressed to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea regarding this accusation were ignored; however denials have now been issued. A spokesperson said, “This is simply more warmongering by the United States of America. For reasons that we cannot comprehend, they’re trying to upset the delicate balance of peace on the Pacific Rim…

Nolan sat in the Gettnors’ basement, feeling depressed. Tiona’s mother had called with the news that she’d received a message carrying Tiona’s love to him. When he’d broken down, she’d invited him over to lunch and he’d uncomfortably accepted. He didn’t really know Tiona’s mother very well, but didn’t want to reject the invitation. Besides, he thought perhaps spending some time in the house where Tiona had grown up would provide some comfort.

When he’d arrived, he’d found Dante there as well. A lunch of BLT sandwiches had quickly turned into a cathartic affair, each of them bringing up their favorite memories. At a couple of points, Nolan had felt like they were holding a wake, even though Tiona and her father were actually still alive. He’d been astonished to learn that the entire Gettnor family had been kidnapped back when Tiona was in high school.

When talk had turned inevitably to the future, they’d wondered together what General Cooper, the CIA, and the rest of the government might be able to do to rescue their loved ones. Nolan expressed his frustration and sense that somehow he should be able to do something to rescue them himself although he hadn’t even been able to think of a way to locate them.

Lisanne confessed her own hope that somehow she could figure out how to use the saucer to rescue Vaz and Tiona. After more talk, she acceded to Nolan’s request that he be allowed to look at the message Vaz had slipped into her AI. Nolan felt certain that he’d be able to figure out how it had been put there and perhaps be able to backtrack it. Backtracking it to a particular computer in cyberspace somewhere wouldn’t give them the physical location of that computer in anything but the broadest sense, but he felt like anything they knew would be helpful.

To his chagrin, Nolan’s computer skills were completely inadequate to the task. Although the AI could bring the message up, Nolan couldn’t even determine where it was stored in the computer’s memory. As he tried each thing he could think of, Lisanne would tell him she’d already tried it. Worse, she rattled off a long list of other things she’d also tried, many of them techniques he’d never even heard of. After he’d given her another surprised look, Dante said, “I’m thinking Tiona never told you that Mom paid the bills working as a programmer back in the day.”

Eventually talk had turned to GSI. Dante had told him about the scrambled memory in Vaz and Tiona’s computers. Dante again asked Nolan about the possibility that he might work out how to make thrusters
without
any of their notes. Could Nolan, just from the fairly ill-defined discussions of thrusters he’d had with Tiona, work out how to make a thruster himself?

They’d gone down to the basement to look at the equipment. Dante had suggested that perhaps some of the equipment was still set up as it had been to make a thruster and so Nolan carefully recorded the settings on every machine before touching it.