Disc (19 page)

Tiona was talking to someone through her AI. Bob had been thinking that they were still well out of the atmosphere, but then he glanced out the windows and found to his surprise that the saucer seemed to be inside some kind of a building. “Where the hell are we?” he asked.

Nolan said, “We’re in a construction hanger at Costa and Sons. They’re the ones that built this saucer. Right now they’re installing the fixture for grabbing the satellite.”

Bob looked out all the windows without seeing anyone doing any work on the saucer. “Where are they going to put it?”

“Um, they’re bolting it to the bottom right now. That’s those little clanking and scratching noises you hear faintly.”

Now that the noises had been pointed out, Bob noticed them. “Have they got us up on some kind of scaffold to work underneath the saucer?”

Nolan grinned at him, “Remember? It’s got thrusters. Tiona’s got the AI floating it the right distance off the floor so the guys can screw the grabber on. That’s who she’s talking to. She’s been moving it up and down and turning it back and forth so the bolts line up.”

A few minutes later, a door on the big hangar opened and the saucer floated out into the dusk. Once again, Bob watched the world fall away beneath him as the saucer shot up into the sky. “Are we going after the satellite right now?”

Tiona said, “I thought we should give it a try. We don’t have much time. The real question will be, if the gripper won’t lock onto the satellite, whether we should try an EVA to see if we can manually lock it on.”

“If it’s underneath the saucer, I assume you must have cameras that let you line it up?”

“Yeah,” she said, then spoke a couple of quick words to her AI and pointed at a set of screens in front of the seats.

Bob looked at them and saw a heavy duty arm protruding from the bottom of the saucer. It had a large clamp on it with what looked like some kind of custom fixture, presumably to grab onto some part of the satellite. “I imagine it could be kind of touchy trying to get that fixture to lock on. It looks like it has to fit something on the satellite exactly?”

“Yeah, that’s what makes me worry we’ll need an EVA. I have this sinking feeling that we could spend hours moving the saucer around, trying to get the fixture lined up exactly. I don’t think it’s something the saucer’s AI will be able to do very well. On the other hand, somebody in a suit out there could probably do it by hand in a few minutes once we got it pretty close.”

Bob said, “All right! I’m your man.”

“You’re not our employee, you’re our suit consultant!”

He lifted an eyebrow, “I’ve actually
done
an EVA. Sign me up as an employee.  We’ll
all
be a lot safer with me out there.”

A few minutes later, Bob found himself reading an employee contract for GSI and recording verbal agreement to it.

Fortunately, Vaz’s program worked as well as he’d told them it would. Tiona gave the saucer’s AI the orbital elements General Cooper had relayed to her and about fifteen minutes later, the saucer approached Space Command’s satellite. Per her request, it assumed the same orbit as the satellite, but 100 meters behind it. She was glad to see the satellite wasn’t rotating, spinning, tumbling or anything like that. Space Command had detached it from the upper stage of the launch rocket as promised, then used its station-keeping rockets to steady it.

Initially Tiona tried to use the joystick controller to put the saucer in front of the satellite. However, when she accelerated toward the satellite, the counterintuitive orbital mechanics which caused the saucer to move outward and then actually fall
behind
the satellite because of its bigger orbit made this very confusing. Eventually, she told the AI to adjust their orbit to place the saucer ten feet in front of the satellite. It actually did so by
decelerating
a little, which caused the saucer’s orbit to move inside the satellite’s and pass it by virtue of the faster inner orbit. Then the saucer accelerated to move its orbit back out to just in front of the satellite.

Over this short ten foot distance, the tendency for the saucer to move inward when she decelerated to back up to the satellite was much less noticeable. However, even over such a short distance, with the joystick’s sensitivity set to make essentially micro adjustments, docking the grabber to the satellite proved to be quite frustrating. After a while, Tiona resorted to giving the saucer’s AI instructions regarding which way she wanted it to move.

She was able to bump the grasping fixture against the handling ring on the satellite multiple times, but wasn’t able to get it aligned well enough to lock on. Tiona swore in frustration, finally saying, “I guess we’re going to have to go out there and line that SOB up by hand.”

Sophie said, “Before we do it, I think we should depressurize the saucer down to five PSI so that we’ll all be able to egress and ingress more quickly. When exiting, we should each stay in the airlock for a few minutes to make sure there aren’t any problems with our suit. Then two of us should go out so we’ll have somebody ready to help if one of the suits has a problem.”

Tiona said, “I think a third person should be in the airlock with it already decompressed to vacuum. Then they’ll be ready to go out and help if the first two have an issue.”

They lowered the pressure in their suits and the main cabin, doing it gradually so everyone could pop their ears. Tiona wanted to be one of the people to EVA, but listened to reason when Nolan pointed out that she was the logical person to be in control of the saucer if a real problem occurred.

Bob climbed into the airlock, decompressed it and then stayed in the lock for five minutes, moving around in his suit to make sure there weren’t any problems. Next, he snapped his EVA safety cable to the ring outside the lock and climbed out. Sophie, having had more training than anyone other than Bob, climbed in the lock and decompressed next. She also stayed in the lock for five minutes twisting and turning to make sure there weren’t any problems with her suit, especially the helmet seal.

When Sophie climbed out of the airlock, Nolan cycled in. Sophie and Bob moved off around the edge of the saucer, trailing their safety cables and holding on to grips which had been installed just for this maneuver. When they reached the satellite, Bob reminded Sophie not to get her fingers between the satellite and the gripping fixture. They clipped short safety lines on, then taking positions on either side, they each put one hand on the satellite and one hand on the saucer’s gripping fixture. Though it took several minutes of pulling to maneuver the two massive objects into the correct alignment, once they’d done so, the actual locking of the satellite to the saucer was somewhat anticlimactic.

Bob called out to Tiona, “Before we come in, give it just a little bit of thrust to be sure it all holds together.”

“You guys move up onto the deck of the saucer and take a good grip before I do that,” Tiona said. “I don’t want you getting thrown off, or even worse being hit by any parts that break off the fixture or the satellite under load.”

A few minutes later they felt some pressure as the saucer started gently towing the satellite. Nothing broke so they got ready to go back in through the airlock. Nolan protested, “You guys have got to let me climb outside for at least a minute! I came thousands of miles to go to this party; you can’t stop me at the door!”

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?”