Disc (23 page)

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.

Vaz had been wrapping Tiona’s pillowcase around his hand. Though he realized he had no chance, he continued walking slowly toward them. In an Asian accent, one said, “We won’t hurt you. Stop and put your hands behind your back.”

Having gotten close, Vaz lunged out…

“Mi-chin-sae-ki! (Crazy asshole!),” Jong heard one of his men shout over the open comm. Then came the sound of Tasers firing and the thumps of bodies falling. “What the hell’s going on?” Jong shouted, stifling the impulse to remind them to speak English.

“The eh-ja (retard) hit Yun!”

“You Tased him?”

“Yes!”

“Give him the shot and get him out to the van! Go!”

A moment later Jong heard one of the Americans they’d hired say, “This son’va bitch is
heavy
!” A few minutes later he felt relief when the door opened and four men came out carrying a heavy bundle. Behind them came two more men carrying something, presumably Yun. One of the men outside the house had already captured the daughter and carried her to the van at the neighboring house.

“Meet at the ambulance!” Jong shouted needlessly. Everyone knew where to go.

The vans backed out of the driveways and drove away in two different directions. After a moment Jong pulled out of his spot and drove off in a third direction.

Four blocks from there, the two vans pulled in next to an ambulance and moved the two Gettnors into it. With the medics keeping a close eye on their passengers, it pulled out and headed for the airport. Jong was already on his way to the airport. He got a call from Cho, “Yun look like he going die.”

“What?! What happened?” Jong asked.

“Gettnor hit him in jaw. Face all broken in. Yun look like he choking. We take him hospital.”

“No!” Jong had liked Yun so he hated saying it, but, “The supreme leader has a personal interest in this project and he doesn’t want there to be any trail. You’ll have to kill him and take his body to the landfill.”

“Okay,” Cho said actually sounding relieved. There hadn’t been any love lost between Cho and Yun. “These American you hire. They want they money.”

“Same thing as Yun,” Jong said.

“Okay,” Cho said. Jong
immediately
heard the coughing sound that Cho’s silenced gun made. It seemed to fire over and over for a long time, but was probably only a few seconds. “Done,” Cho said. “I go where you say we meet.”

Jong had always thought Cho was a cold son of a bitch…

***

Tiona tried to turn on her side. She couldn’t because her wrist seemed to be caught on something. She blinked her eyes at blurry lights, trying to get the crud out of them that made it so hard to see. Raising her head she tried to look down and see what was caught on her wrist. It looked like some kind of a metal ring!

A handcuff.

Tiona’s head sagged back. She had only a vague recollection of going out the window. She kept blinking while she turned her head side to side. To her left she saw her dad. His eyes were open and he was watching her. On the other side of him sat an Asian man, also staring at Tiona. She seemed to be in some kind of a cylindrical structure.

An airplane. From the noise it was on its way to somewhere. “Hey Dad,” she said.

“Hey Tiona,” he responded.

“Looks like I didn’t get away after all.”

“No.”

Tiona looked down and saw that his wrist also had a handcuff on it.

Crap.
She looked at the Asian man, “I have to pee.”

The guy stared at her for a moment, then said, “Go ahead. You have a catheter in your bladder.”

Another Asian guy leaned into view, “It’s not uncommon to feel like you have to go when you’ve got a catheter in. Just try to relax.” After a moment he said, “Would you like something to eat?”

“I’d like my freedom!”

The first man said, “You’ll have it again, don’t worry. You need to tell us how to build the thrusters first though.”

***

General Cooper said, “What?!”

“The Gettnors have been kidnapped.”

“Shit! By who?” He realized with sudden clarity that the Gettnors represented a national resource that he should’ve been protecting.

“Unknown. They appear to be Asian on the video recordings.”

“They let you see their faces?!”

“They cut the power and the internet to the house. Apparently they expected that to fully disable the household AI, however Gettnor had the house on backup power from some new version of his fusion plant. A small one, not made by GE. We asked GE—they didn’t even know that it was possible to make them that small. Anyway, the household AI was fully functional and recorded the whole thing. There were both Asians and Caucasians in the group, but they seemed separate and the Asians seemed to be in charge.”

“I’m on my way,” Cooper said. “Do we have any idea where they’re taking the Gettnors? Any way to track them?”