Disc (31 page)

Wide-eyed, Tiona matched him, wondering what in the world was going on. She saw his lips move and was thinking she needed to lift a hand off so she could hear him when a ripping series of explosions made her glad she hadn’t. Apparently he’d been speaking to his AI. Seeing that he’d taken his hands off of his ears, she dropped her own and said, “What the
hell
just happened?!”

“Shaped charges,” Vaz said grabbing her by the wrist and tugging her toward the door of her room. He paused at the opening and looked out. She leaned around him to see. Nothing moved but dust. Much of their neatly organized equipment lay in disarray. “Let’s go,” Vaz said, hurrying off in his oddly heavy gait.

“Where?” Tiona asked, though she didn’t expect him to answer.

Vaz spoke quickly, presumably to his AI. The two thick, one-meter discs lifted off the floor and swooped out in front of him. One dropped down to just above floor level and went around the corner. An image flicked on in Tiona’s HUD and she looked up at it. Apparently her HUD was bringing her video from infrared cameras mounted in the disc. The room next door was a wreck, but nothing moved other than fine floating debris. Vaz walked around the corner and Tiona followed him.

A long, ragged, horizontal slot had been blown in the wall that separated the main part of the lab from the room the guards stayed in.

There were no guards to be seen. Suddenly, Tiona remembered the row of long rectangular plastic tubs filled with the plastic that Vaz had made in the hood. They’d been lined up on the shelf on that wall. Heart in her throat, she turned to her father, “
You
blew that hole in the wall?”

He nodded, but it was evident that his attention was on his HUD. She glanced around for the two one meter discs and saw one going out a hole that had been blown in the other wall. She could hear a high-pitched whine coming from it. The hole in this wall was a couple of one meter circles right where the dish shaped top house of a pair of the meter discs had been leaning.

Dishes with the big groove around the edge partially filled with Vaz’s “plastic.”

Presumably plastic explosive.

She would bet that the V-shaped groove that Vaz had left in that ring of plastic was what made it a “shaped charge.”

Tiona looked up at her HUD. It looked like she was seeing an infrared image of the yard outside their building. She could see a wall topped with razor wire just like she’d seen out their windows. Much more evident than the wall was a pile of burning debris to one side and a number of people running around excitedly. She could tell they were carrying AK-47s. One of them started running toward the disc, unlimbering his weapon and beginning to point it toward the camera.

The image suddenly centered itself on the running man. She heard a sound like a loud fast zipper and the man exploded into mist.

“What?!” she heard herself gasp. Then, more weakly, “
What
just happened?”

There was no answer, but the picture on the video screen swept across the men in the yard and the zipping sound came again and again. The men were demolished one after another until the last few ran around the corner and disappeared. Vaz said, “Okay, we can go.” He tugged her wrist as he ducked down and stepped through the hole made by the one meter disc tops. Tiona noticed peripherally that the hole had been blown right through the concrete blocks of their prison’s wall.

Tiona followed him, heart pounding in her chest.
Where can we possibly go?
she wondered, but then saw the eight meter saucer settling into the yard and tipping to lower its back deck for them.

Vaz ran toward it in his clumsy looking gait and she followed on his heels. Before she could throw a knee up at the edge of the deck, he grabbed her by the upper arm and easily lifted her onto the deck. She turned to give him a hand, but he placed both hands on the deck and vaulted effortlessly up onto it. “Inside! Now!”

She turned, opened the door and pulled herself in. Vaz was right behind her.

She threw herself into what she thought of as the pilot’s seat, because that’s where she’d always sat. She’d expected Vaz to get into the seat beside her, instead he dropped into the middle seat behind her. He said, “Take it up!”

Tiona did, wondering as she directed the AI why he hadn’t just told it to go up himself…

***

At Yodok penal labor colony number fifteen, guard Jok Wan-li stepped into the hut that held the new girl. Not yet starved, she was by far the most attractive of the women in the camp at present. He went to the mat she slept on and found an old hag lying in her place. Angrily, he looked around the hut. He saw someone lying behind another prisoner. He stalked over and found it was the girl. He leaned down and jerked her to her feet.

As he dragged her through the hut, he saw that she’d already been sobbing and crying. Not uncommon, after being gang raped every night for a week, but she’d get used to it. He took her outside and started to drag her toward the guard house.

Jok stopped, surprised, when he heard the roaring of a big diesel motor. He looked towards the sound. In the dim light, he saw a truck rolling rapidly down the road toward the gate.

Jok stopped in some confusion. In the first place, trucks never arrived at night. In the second place, this truck didn’t even have its lights on. Lastly, it was going so fast he thought it was going to have a hard time stopping at the gate.

Then it swerved a little to the right and crashed right through the guard house. Jok dropped the woman’s arm and started to run toward the accident. The small building had been destroyed! Surely Jok’s friends, who’d been waiting in the guard shack for him to bring the girl, had been injured if not killed. As he ran to the door of the truck he pulled out his weapon, thinking he should kill the driver.

He jerked the door open.

No one was in the vehicle!

The radio was blaring a spoken message. He expected to hear the usual propaganda, but instead, a loud but poorly worded statement said, “The dictatorship of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has been overthrown. Declare your freedom! Work for justice! Achieve real democracy!” The message began to repeat.

Jok turned to look. Prisoners were beginning to come out of their huts at the noise. He called out to his fellow guards, but no one responded. One of the prisoners bent over and picked up a rock. Jok began to lift his weapon, but a rock coming from his other side laid him out.

More big trucks crested the hill and began rolling down toward the camp. One after another they turned off to crash into the other guard houses. Then a long series plowed into the guards’ barracks. Those trucks that still ran backed up and then drove over to the main gate to join other trucks that waited in front of it.

First as a trickle, then as a flood, the prisoners began to head for the trucks. When the crowd found that several of the trucks carried full loads of food, ecstatic joy swept over the starving prisoners.

After the prisoners had shared the food, a few of them eating too much and throwing up, they began climbing in the trucks and directing them to leave. Some prisoners headed back to their home cities, others—unable to believe that Kims’ reign of terror was finished—turned their trucks toward China, a final group started for Pyongyang, anxious to contribute to the establishment of their
new
government.

***

Across North Korea, the internet shut down. All computers that were turned on at the time were left with a single message on their screen which could not be taken down. “The dictatorship of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has been overthrown. Declare your freedom! Work for justice! Achieve real democracy!”

Those loyal members of Kim Sung-Jong’s totalitarian regime who remained found themselves unable to communicate with one another. Everywhere, phones, radios, TVs, computers, and the few AIs that existed in North Korea, simply carried the message that the government had been overthrown. Some kind of virus had overcome every digital processor connected to the net.

As people came to understand that the reviled leadership of their despised government had truly been decimated, they began to show up in droves to do away with anyone who even thought of resurrecting the tyranny.

***

A garage door rolled open on the north side of Raleigh. A man stared as a flying saucer dropped down out of the sky and slid into the opening. He blinked a couple of times, but by then he had driven past the opening and the door was closing.

***

Lisanne sat in the breakfast nook of the Gettnors’ kitchen, staring sightlessly out the window and wondering what to do with herself that day. Her life had seemed so vibrant and full back before those men had killed Tiona’s guards and carried away her husband and daughter.

A thumping sound came from the basement. Lisanne startled to her feet, spilling her coffee. Could someone be down there trying to steal Vaz’s computers?! Or perhaps some of the equipment or one of the incomplete projects Vaz had been working on?

The sound became a heavy tread ascending the stairs and Lisanne moved to the door to the backyard. As she started to pull the door open, she barked, “AI, connect me to 911!”

The door to the basement opened and Vaz stepped out.

A tinny voice said, “911, please state your emergency.”

With a trembling hand, Lisanne slid shut the door to the backyard. Saying, “No emergency, sorry!” she ran across the room to her husband. She drove into him, throwing her arms around him and feeling his solid bulk stiffening as it always did when someone hugged him. “Vaz!” She drew back, “Are you okay?” Then she saw Tiona standing behind him and darted around her husband to fiercely hug her daughter as well. “Are you okay?!” she asked again, pushing back to look her daughter up and down,
She looks so thin!

“Yeah, Mom, we’re okay,” Tiona said, pulling her mother back for another hug. “We’re free, we’re home, in fact—things are pretty damn good.”

Lisanne frowned, “Why didn’t you call? Why wait till you’d gotten here to let me know you’re okay?!”

Tiona gave her a trembling smile as her eyes brimmed with tears. She said, “It’s only a fifty minute flight Mom. We decided it would be nicer to tell you in person.”

Lisanne looked from her daughter to her husband and back to her husband, then pulled them both into a hug. Nurturing instinct in full bloom, she said, “Would you guys like some breakfast?”

“Oh God yes!” Tiona gasped. “You wouldn’t believe the crap we’ve been eating. But, even more than breakfast, I want a shower. Then a fast breakfast and I’ll be off to see Nolan. I’d be seeing him already, if it wasn’t for how I must smell!”

As Tiona showered, she thought about how her father had answered her questions while the saucer was making its suborbital trip back to North Carolina.  The first thing she’d asked was what had happened to the guards in their building.  As she had queasily suspected, Vaz had put the electronic devices Tiona had wired up for him into the bottom of the long rectangular plastic tubs where they’d acted as detonators.  He’d partially filled the tubs with the mixture of PETN and nitrocellulose he’d made in the fume hood.  The partial filling of the tubs left a cup shaped defect in the plastic on the side toward the wall. That cup was what made them “shaped charges.”

When he’d fired those shaped charges, they’d blown the slot-shaped hole she’d seen in the wall.  As the material from that slot had blown out the other side of the wall into the guard room, the high velocity debris had presumably either killed or disabled the guards inside. Apparently, Vaz had waited until just after the guards had finished their rounds and returned to their room, so the blast would have a better chance of taking them all out.

Tiona had hated those guards for imprisoning her, but had an uneasy feeling that they were just doing their jobs.  She wasn’t sure they deserved to die.  She considered asking her father how he felt about it, but the placid look on his face told her he didn’t feel concerned.

Next she asked him what had happened to the guards out in the yard around their laboratory/prison.  Without any reticence/ he explained that the high pitched humming she’d heard coming from the 1-meter discs had been the internal platters counter-rotating at 5000 rpm. 

The platters that had been filled with ball bearings. 

At his command, the platters had released ball bearings from their periphery at a point in the platter’s rotation that sent the bearings flying tangentially toward the center of the field of the disc’s camera.  The bearings were traveling at about 250 m/s, which was a similar velocity to that of bullets fired from handguns.  The weapon wasn’t very accurate, but flinging 600 bearings per second, it didn’t have to be.

Tiona had realized with some horror that the barrage of bearings was what had blown the guards into mist. Curious despite her revulsion she’d asked, “Why a rotating platter?”

“Didn’t look like a weapon,” he’d said with a shrug.

Having absorbed that, she then asked, “Weren’t you worried that their air defense system would see our saucer coming down and fire at it, either when it was descending or when it was going back up with us on board?”