Disc (29 page)

Alston gave another dismissive wave and turned to the president. “Ma’am, there are
way
too many ways this kind of operation can go wrong. We do not want to stick our di… finger in that meat grinder, there’s much too high a chance we’ll lose it. The international outcry if we are found sending a hostile mission into another country will be horrendous.” He spread his hands, “It’s just
not
worth the kind of international embarrassment this would bring us!”

President Miles had watched the confrontation between the two men with a bemused look on her face. Now she said, “Darby, first of all you have totally underestimated the importance of this man to our country.” She raised a halting hand when Alston drew a breath to interrupt, “Second, you seem to have forgotten that North Korea sent a hostile mission into
our
country to kidnap the Gettnors in the first place. They killed a number of our citizens, admittedly undesirable ones, but nonetheless, citizens.
We
should not be embarrassed if we do the same to them.” Once again she stopped Alston when he looked like he was about to interrupt, “We
should
be embarrassed, however, if you guys fail to retrieve the Gettnors. I hereby direct you to figure out how to do this so you
don’t
get your ‘dicks’ stuck in that grinder.”

***

Cooper said, “Really?! That’s all the information he gave you?! I’ve finally got permission from the President herself to go after him and he can’t help any more than that?!”

Lisanne tried not to get angry. “Remember, this is the way he is. He answered your questions. Not elaborating with further information beyond the simplest possible answers to the questions you posed is very typical for him. I’d suggest that you give me a list of further questions in which you ask
exactly
what it is you want to know.
Don’t
assume that he will tell you things you might think are obvious.”

“Okay,” Cooper said, sounding exasperated. “I’ll work on a list of
precision
questions and send it to you in the next few hours.” He sighed, “Ask him to answer them as
soon
as he possibly can. Remind him we’re
trying
to get him free!”

“You need to consider that he may not have access to the internet all that often.”

“Yeah, sorry. I’m sure you want him back here even more than I do…”

***

Vaz and Tiona bent toward one another over the precipitation of a one meter disc. They’d been talking nonsense chemistry for some time now and Lim and Ko, their scientific keepers, had finally become bored.

At first, when they’d begun actually precipitating thruster membranes and the two North Korean scientists had begun watching very carefully, Tiona had worried that her dad
was
giving away the thruster secret. Then she’d watched as he consistently used the wrong chemicals. At first, she thought he planned to simply make nonfunctional thrusters and claim he couldn’t do it there in North Korea. Comprehension slowly dawned when she saw him pick up a bottle of a solution that he called “sodium chloride.” She clearly remembered him mixing up that solution a couple of days before using lithium chloride. At the time he’d called it sodium chloride and she passed it off as a simple slip of the tongue. Now she saw that he’d also
labeled
it sodium chloride!

She’d begun to realize another reason why he’d ordered
so
many chemicals beyond those that were actually needed to precipitate the thruster membranes. He made up solutions quickly, using different chemicals and different concentrations than he said he was using as he spoke for the video recordings that Lim and Ko were making. He quickly and surely mislabeled almost every chemical he used and surprised her with sleight-of-hand as he switched chemicals between measuring them out and putting them into their solutions. The changes were so many, and so quick that she found herself astonished that he managed to keep the chemicals straight when he was done. That he kept them straight while they were labeled wrong was just as surprising as the fact that he was doing this in the first place.

Actually, as obsessive as he was about carefully labeling everything, it was hard to believe that he was even willing to mislabel something, even to throw someone off!

Vaz made up a lot of chemicals and solutions which were completely unnecessary, then eventually dipped parts in them as if he were treating them chemically, then discarded the solutions, calling them by the name of one of the mislabeled solutions that they actually did use. Someone trying to figure out how the membranes had actually been made by going through the video and audio record with a fine toothed comb would surely find it impossible to reconstruct the process.

Then, when he did actually precipitate the doped graphene membranes, he would subsequently precipitate layers of other chemicals on top of them which Tiona realized would make attempts to determine the
actual
doping scheme by subsequent analysis extremely difficult.

She found it hard to believe that someone like her father, whom she had never thought of as having a devious bone in his body, could be so deceitful and underhanded.

It made her proud.

In any case, Lim and Ko were far enough away now that they wouldn’t really know what was being said over the precipitation. Tiona flipped on a noisy magnetic stirrer and quietly asked, “You got GPS data from the little disc when they took it outside?”

“Uh-huh, and all the way to the leader’s home,” Vaz said softly.

“What?!” Tiona hissed, still careful to keep her voice barely audible. “How?!”

“It records GPS data all the time. Whenever it gets near a Wi-Fi it downloads it to me.”

“Have you found a way to stay hooked up to the internet even when they have the fiber optic connection cut off?”

“No, everything’s just stored in a couple of randomly chosen computers on the outside. The data’s downloaded to me whenever Khang hooks up the fiber-optic connection.”

“So, you’ve sent our location on to General Cooper?”

Vaz didn’t say anything for a long time. When he finally responded, all he said was, “No.”

“Why not?!” Tiona hissed.

Again, he didn’t respond for a while, then he said, “I think they’ll send people to try to break us out.”

“Exactly! I
hope
so.” She gave him a curious look, “What’s wrong with that?”

“Some of them’ll get killed.”

This brought Tiona to an abrupt halt. She’d considered in the abstract that someone might get injured, but thought of it as a possibility, not a certainty. “These are the kinds of things those people do! They’re
really
good at it.”

Vaz raised his eyes to hers, “We shouldn’t risk their lives to save ours, should we?”

Tiona felt her world shift under her. She and her father had rarely if ever had any discussions about morality. Because of his odd personality she’d always thought of herself as having the more moral outlook on the world. If her father had morals, she’d thought of them as rudimentary. To be confronted now with her life on the line, with the idea that they shouldn’t risk soldiers’ lives to save their own, brought her up short. She stared at him for a moment before coming up with a response, “You’ve said you were willing to kill these guys so we could go free.”

He frowned, “Of course,” he said giving her a look as if he couldn’t believe she didn’t understand. “The people who’ve enslaved us are
evil
. Any soldiers who might come to rescue us would be good people trying to win our freedom.
They
don’t deserve to die.”

“But… Dad, I don’t want to stay here,” Tiona said blinking back tears. The tears irritated her because she always thought of herself as a strong woman, not the kind who might break down in moments of stress.

Vaz blinked at her a few moments, then said, “Of course not, but we can get
ourselves
free.”

Tiona stared at him for a moment, “How?!”

Khang started walking their way. Vaz tilted his head a little querulously and said, “Like we talked about before.” It sounded like he thought it was obvious.

Tiona didn’t want to ask any more questions with Khang standing over them. She wondered which conversation he meant from before.
Maybe the one where I thought he was talking about making weapons?

***

“So,” Rachel said, “the best I could talk either Ford or Boeing into, was an agreement to suspend the contract. They won’t demand any of their money back, but they certainly won’t advance us any more. They both insisted on a codicil to our original agreement which sets them free to negotiate with UNC, or in fact anyone else who figures out how to make thrusters.”

Gary turned to Dante, “And your sister’s boyfriend hasn’t had any luck figuring out how to make thrusters, has he?”

Landon looked at Dante. His friend looked just as depressed as he’d looked every day since half of his immediate family had been kidnapped. He blinked slowly, then looked like he’d come back to reality. He turned his eyes toward Gary, then slowly shook his head.

Gary stared at him for a moment then said, “Sorry man. I’ve hung in here as long as I can. I’ve got an offer to go back to Axel VC and I’m going to have to take it.”

Dante said, almost mournfully, “OK, but we’d be happy to keep you on salary here if you want to stay.”

Gary shook his head, “No, I don’t want to
just
have a decent salary, even if I hardly have to work for it. I want to bust my ass out on the bleeding edge for the chance of a big kill.” He shrugged his shoulders, “Sorry man, that’s just the way I am.”

“Okay,” Dante said. He looked around the rest of the table, “How about the rest of you guys?”

Steve said he was going to have to start looking. Landon was embarrassed about the implication that he was willing to accept his decent salary without working for it. He started thinking that he should be wanting to be out on the bleeding edge as well.

But then Rachel laughed and said, “GSI is the
bleedingest
edge there is. And there’s no chance for a bigger kill anywhere else in the solar system. You guys are idiots! I’m sticking it out. As I see it there’s three things we
should
be doing. First, preserving the contracts we’ve already signed like I’ve been working on. Second, helping any way we possibly can to retrieve Dante’s father and sister. Third, hiring more scientists to try to help Nolan Marlowe figure out the tech, just in case we never get the Gettnors back.” Her eyes scanned the table again, “I think any of you who’re just sitting around drawing your salary ought to be ashamed of yourselves.”

Landon did feel ashamed, but didn’t admit it. Instead, he said, “I agree with Rachel. I’ve watched her busting her ass to maintain the contracts we have.” He looked at Dante, “If you don’t mind, I’ll take on trying to find people to help Marlowe.”

Dante nodded a little listlessly, saying “Go for it.”

Though Rachel had strongly influenced Landon, he was sad to learn that many of the others around the table also said they were going to start looking for other jobs.

***

Tiona glanced back up at the diagram on her HUD. It had appeared there this morning through some of her father’s computer wizardry. She had gone in to where he was working in the high ventilation fume hood. Despite the hood, she could smell nitric acid fumes when she approached. Vaz had on a gas mask and Ko, standing behind Vaz and watching over his shoulder, had on the other one. Tiona asked Ko if she could wear the gas mask for a moment to talk to her father and Ko gave it to her. When she stepped up, Vaz had several stirrers going in large fuming beakers. The stirrers were making enough noise that she could lean close to him and lift the gas mask away to talk. Lim and Ko were far enough back she felt certain they couldn’t hear.

Curious, she asked, “What are you making?”

Vaz looked up at her. Even through the mask, she could see he wasn’t happy about her question. After a moment, he said, “The plastic for the one meter discs.”

Since those discs didn’t need any plastic, Tiona immediately realized that she’d asked a question in the realm of those she wasn’t
supposed
to ask. Having asked, she was supposed to pretend she understood exactly what he was doing, so, speaking loudly enough that she thought the men behind her could hear, she said, “Oh, the plastic synthesis. I forgot it used acid.” Speaking more quietly, she continued, “I’ve got a diagram on my HUD. Are you wanting me to build that circuit?”

Vaz only nodded. “Anytime you’re not working on the toys.” The supreme leader had been very excited about the six inch flying disc they’d made him and had ordered them to make more. Apparently he wanted to give them to high-ranking loyalists in his government. Tiona had been building them because that freed up Vaz to work on the flying car.