Sophie had been forcing herself to go in to mission control each day and call her two friends. She had accepted the fact that they were going to die. She hated talking to them when she knew they weren’t going to make it. But she would never be able to live with herself if she deserted them now.
She closed her eyes for a moment. This is just a false hope! “So, why don’t you just go get them in this amazing spaceship of yours? Not enough fuel? Don’t know where to get months’ worth of rations that can be easily packed?”
Marlowe said, “Don’t know where Kadoma is.”
Sophie snorted, “You’ve built a spaceship and picked the mission but don’t know how to navigate in space?! You know, tolerances on these kinds of missions are incredibly tight. If your navigation isn’t perfect it’s extremely easy to run out of fuel trying to make course corrections to get you there!”
Her uncle said patiently, “Sophie, we can accelerate at one gravity halfway there, flip and decelerate at one gravity the rest of the way. We could reach Mars in two days! Tolerances aren’t very tight on a trip to Kadoma, but we do need a vague idea where it is.”
Sophie had finished her dinner. She looked at the two men for a minute or two without saying anything. Finally she said, “This is just so ridiculous my head’s spinning. On the other hand, if there is even a lottery ticket’s chance that you guys didn’t just make all this up, I owe it to Zack and Ralph to check it out.”
“Zack and Ralph?”
“White and Abbott.” She held up a delaying finger, “First though, I’m calling my Aunt Mary to make sure you guys didn’t just escape from the funny farm.”
“I hope you can reach her,” Eisner said, “but I’m not holding my breath.”
Sophie’s initial reaction was that, of course I can reach her! In this age, no one was ever out of touch! But when she asked her AI to put through the call, it responded in just a few seconds to say that Mary was not available. Not that she was busy, just that she wasn’t available. It did ask if Sophie wanted to leave a message.
As Sophie said, “Aunt Mary, sorry I missed you…” Marlowe held up a halting hand to interrupt her.
“Don’t… say anything about us!” he hissed in a barely audible tone. It might have been quiet, but he was nonetheless very emphatic.
“Um, this is your niece Sophie,” she continued after the interruption. “I’m hoping you can call me back?” She disconnected and leaned back in her chair, looking at the two men speculatively. “Well, let me pay the check and we’ll go have a look at your spaceship.”
After she paid the check, Sophie found herself walking down deserted streets that seemed to get darker and darker at every corner. They’d told her that their saucer was down at the docks, but somehow she’d thought there would be people there. Though, as she thought about it, if they were trying to keep it a secret, of course they would put it in a part of the docks that wasn’t busy.
Nonetheless, Sophie felt more and more uncomfortable as they walked into the darkness. A fleeting picture of her—not well known to her—uncle as one member of a pair of itinerant serial murderers skittered through her head. Get a grip! she told herself. Then a moment later, she thought, Is the serial murderer story any more ridiculous than the flying saucer story?
They stopped in a shadowy corner where one of the docks met the seawall. Sophie stood just a little behind the two men, not wanting them to be able to get the drop on her. To her surprise, Marlowe tossed three rocks into the water. About a minute later, before she’d gotten done wondering about the rocks, something broke through the surface of the water with a big, soft, slurping splash. It kept rising to expose a central polyhedral dome and the big circular saucer that they had spoken of. Eisner glanced around as if to be sure no one was watching, then made motions with his hands suggesting that the saucer should come higher.
At first, Sophie had been thinking that it was some kind of circular submarine. Something that they had brought to fool her. But it kept rising higher and higher until it became obvious that the saucer no longer remained in touch with the water. There were no propellers. No ducted fans, no jets, no screeching rockets, no crane overhead, only a gentle thrumming sound. It finally stopped when the deck of the big saucer stood level with the top of the seawall.
Uncle Bob said, “Wanna to go for a ride?”
By the time Sophie finally managed to nod, Marlowe had already climbed onto the deck of the big saucer and opened a door. Sophie climbed onto the seawall and then stepped out onto the deck of the saucer herself. She felt it sink a tiny bit under her foot, then recover as if under AI control. She could feel a gentle thrumming through the soles of her feet. A moment later she was crouching to go in through a door that opened into a small chamber. The two doors, one after the other, were obviously intended to serve as a one person airlock, though the inner door stood open at present.
Inside, Sophie saw a pretty young woman in one of five seats that looked like they belonged in an SUV, though they were heavy duty. Acceleration seats? Sophie noted that the young woman’s eyes tracked Marlowe for a few seconds. Are they a couple? Sophie wondered. Then the young woman waved Sophie into one of the seats, saying, “Do you have a way for us to stay in communication with NASA all the way out to Kadoma?”
Sophie sat, but then stared at the blonde girl for a moment. She said a little exasperatedly, “Even if you could actually get there, I’m not sure I’d go.”
The young woman turned to look questioningly at Eisner and Marlowe.
Eisner shrugged, “We’ve talked and talked. She still doesn’t believe this is possible. She isn’t being unreasonable, if someone came to me with our story I’d think they were crazy…” he snorted. “At least I would have before I’d been up in this thing.” He turned to Sophie, “Sophie, this is Tiona Gettnor. She’s the one that discovered the thrust effect while working in my lab. She and her dad are the ones that built this…” he grinned, “flying saucer.”
Tiona looked at Sophie speculatively, “So, I guess we need to take you for a ‘convincing’ ride, then? Do we need to take you all the way to space? Or will a little flying around be enough?”
“Aren’t you worried that if we try to go to space, the big bad government people will shoot us down?” Sophie said in a snarky tone.
Tiona gave Sophie an irritated look. “Yes I am. So doing it would take most of the night. We’d need to fly far out offshore at a low altitude, then up to space from somewhere hundreds of miles away. Getting to space doesn’t take long, but getting to a safe place to launch and then coming back would take most of the night.”
Sophie looked from one to the other at the three people in the saucer with her. They all looked back in dead seriousness, tempered with a hint of frustration. Sophie said, “You really do believe you can do this, don’t you?”
They all nodded. Eisner said, “But we need to be able to find Kadoma, and a way to communicate with NASA. We’ve also got to be able to talk to the astronauts while we’re out there.”
Suddenly, an AI voice came on in the cabin. It said, “Tiona, your father would like to speak to you.”
The other three people appeared to be very startled by this announcement. After a moment’s thought, Sophie realized that was because they had believed all communication to the saucer was being interdicted. Tiona said, “AI, I thought I instructed you not to transmit?”
The AI responded, “I have not transmitted, but your father has downloaded a new communication program into my system. This was followed by the request for communication. He states that, with the new communication program in place, no one will be able to intercept our transmissions.”
Sophie almost laughed out loud. The arrogance of anyone who thought they could out program the NSA would have to be stupendous. Tiona, however, apparently accepted the AI’s statement at face value. She said, “Okay, I’ll take the call.”
Marlowe apparently felt the same as Sophie, reaching up a hand and putting it on Tiona’s arm, “Tiona!
I’m not sure anyone can encrypt a message that the NSA can’t decode! At the very least, they’ll know where we are!”
Tiona shrugged, “Dad’s… an astonishingly good programmer. If anyone in the world can beat the NSA at their game, it would be him. Dad, are you there?”
“Yes.” Sophie thought the man’s voice sounded… odd. Like he didn’t talk much. There was quite a pause, then he said, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. But you were right about the government being after us. I’m sorry I didn’t take your warning seriously enough. They showed up in Chapel Hill with helicopters and tried to board the saucer. Something about restricting alien technology for military purposes or some such shit.”
“They broke into our house too.”
“How did you get away?”
“Went out the Johnson’s side door.”
“Ha! They didn’t see that coming, huh? Um, these people are deadly serious Dad. We escaped the helicopters by launching for space, but they fired four air to air missiles at us! We outran their missiles, but… dammit!”
“What are you going to do now?”
“We think that we can protect ourselves by getting a lot of publicity. We could get a lot of publicity by flying the saucer into some public place, but a lot of those are protected from terrorists so we’re worried that someone might shoot us down as we approached. Right now we’re meeting with Professor Eisner’s niece who’s an astronaut for NASA. Our hope is that she can help us fly out to Kadoma and rescue the astronauts who are stranded there. Bringing them back should get us a lot of publicity, far away from the people who’re after us.”
Sophie was impressed by the way the three of them and now the purported father all stuck to their saucer storyline. Then she wondered how they could possibly have scripted all of this out in advance. Then she remembered that she was sitting in a saucer, apparently floating above the water of Galveston Bay.
A woman’s voice came on rather than Gettnor senior, “Tiona! Flying out to an asteroid has got to be a lot more dangerous than just turning yourself into the police. You can’t fight the whole government!”
“Hi Mom,” Tiona said sounding tired. “Those kinds of thoughts have been going around and around in my brain ever since we took off. But we’re hoping the group that’s after us doesn’t represent the ‘whole’ government. We think they have a high likelihood of being able to pick us up from any local Police Department we might turn ourselves in to. The way they intercepted our communications suggests the NSA is involved, and if they’re involved they can block us from access to our credit, or any of our friends. They’ll certainly know almost immediately if we show up anywhere that puts our names into public systems.”
The mother didn’t respond. They heard Tiona’s father again, “I’ve uploaded Kadoma’s orbit to the saucer’s AI. Even though the asteroid doesn’t have a very high albedo, the saucer should be able to fly you close enough that you’ll be able to see it.”
Tiona barked a laugh, “How did you get that information?!”
“Google search.”
“Okaay,” Nolan said. “How do we know where we are, once we’re far enough out that we can’t use GPS anymore?”
“The saucer’s AI computes your position fairly accurately from the position of stars in its cameras. It also computes position from the distance signal transmitted by NASA’s Space-NAV satellite in combination with x-ray signals from several pulsars. It’s a version of ‘X-NAV.’”
Tiona gave a little laugh, evidently delighted at having the Kadoma location problem solved. “Once we get there, how are we going to communicate with the astronauts?”
“The saucer’s AI and radio system can transmit and receive on multiple bands using most common encoding systems. I don’t know what coding system or frequencies Bellerphon uses though.”
Tiona laughed delightedly, “That’s great! Are you and Mom okay?”
“Yes.”
Tiona said, “Mom? Is that true?”
Her mother’s voice came on the line, “Yeah. We’re hidden away in a crappy little hotel and I find it pretty infuriating that we have to hide, but I think we’re safe.”
“Is there anything we can do for you?”
“Um,” Tiona’s father said, “I tracked the people who broke into our house. General Alonzo Harding of NORAD’s in charge. He used NSA to track and block all of us. I was mad about it, so I wrote a program to wipe their hard drives, intercept their communications and block them from the net… should I activate it?”
“Um,” Tiona said, looking to Sophie like she actually believed someone could do such a thing. She said, “I don’t think you should. I’d like to go with getting good publicity, rather than getting bad publicity by attacking them in revenge. You could just keep it available in case of emergency.”
“Okay.” Gettnor said, astonishing Sophie by appearing to take direction from his daughter. Either the man’s mentally impaired and needs direction from his daughter, or he’s a genius capable of attacking the NSA on their home turf… he couldn’t be both could he?
Tiona said, “How do we get a hold of you if we need to?”
“Just talk to the saucer’s AI. If it can reach the net, the program will reach us. No one can intercept.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Gettnor said, “Have you been out in space? I’ve had the program ready several hours, but I haven’t been able to reach the saucer until just a few minutes ago.”
Tiona said, “No, we’ve been hiding under the water in Galveston Bay.”
“The saucer’s been underwater?”
“Uh-huh, we figured if it’s airtight it should be watertight. We haven’t been going very deep.”
“Good, the windows might implode if you go deeper than,” he paused, “nine meters.” After a moment of additional thought he continued, “Or shallower than that if you try to go very fast. The front windows would be under more pressure.”
Tiona gave a little laugh, “Okay, thanks. We’ll try to keep that in mind.” After saying goodbye she turned to Sophie, “I guess we don’t need your help after all. Sorry to have bothered you. It would be nice if you could tell us what frequencies and what encoding to use when we’re trying to communicate with the Bellerphon? We don’t have a spacesuit, so we won’t be able to get out and knock on their door.”
“Um, I’ve been fitted for a spacesuit,” Sophie found herself saying. “I could go back to Houston and get the spacesuit that fits me. It also has a radio that’ll contact Bellerphon.” She shrugged, “I could also check to be sure position, trajectory and velocity data for Kadoma is correct, as well as finding out the exact frequency and encoding that Bellerphon’s using.”
The other three people in the saucer watched Sophie uncertainly. Finally, Tiona frowned, “I don’t think a spacesuit that fits you will fit me.”
For a second, Sophie thought Tiona was rudely pointing out that she was thinner than Sophie, but then she realized she hadn’t made her intentions clear. She swallowed, “I mean, I’ll go with you to Kadoma. I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but if you really can get there, I’ll never forgive myself for not going with you to get my friends.”
Eisner, Marlowe and Gettnor looked at each other for a second. “Okay,” Gettnor said.
Eisner said, “As exciting as all of this has been, I really don’t want to go back into outer space. You’re going to be weightless when you’re at Kadoma and, from my first experience, I think I’d be barfing the whole time. I’d rather try to get back to the University and shake the publicity tree from there. Besides,” he grinned and waved at the seats, “this is only a five person saucer. If the three of you go get White and Abbott, that’ll be a full load on the way back.”
Over the next thirty minutes they discussed a plan. Eisner and Sophie would take Sophie’s car to Houston. Sophie would “borrow’ her spacesuit and would download data on Kadoma’s location, frequencies, and encoding. She’d get as much cash as she could from ATMs, drop by her h
ouse to get some changes of clothing, and then they would return to the saucer. Eisner would use her car and cash to get back to North Carolina. “Anything else?” Sophie asked.
“Yeah,” Tiona said. “Look through your pantry. My dad stocked this thing with enough food for thirty days, but he chose stuff according to how tightly it could be packed. It’ll be pretty boring if that’s all we’ve got to eat.”
“Oh!” Sophie frowned, “what kind of life support does this thing have?!”
“Water hydrolysis for oxygen. Soda lime for carbon dioxide sequestration with activated charcoal filtration. We’ve got enough for thirty days and the trip to Kadoma should only take… AI, how long will it take us to get to Kadoma?”
“Approximately eight hours from Earth orbit,” the AI responded.
“That can’t be right!” Sophie said, “Bellerphon took nearly two months!”
The AI said imperturbably, “I based that estimation on the following. Kadoma is approximately 2 million kilometers away at present. If we accelerate at a constant one gravity we will cover a little more than 1 million kilometers in four hours. We will then turn over and decelerate for about four more hours. The actual time will depend on when we leave and where we are in Earth’s orbit at the time.”
Sophie swallowed, “OK.”
Sophie and Eisner left. As soon as they were gone Tiona submerged the saucer and Nolan found himself alone with her. The dark water outside the viewport gave him little to look at and he found himself glancing over at her, trying to think of something brilliant or witty to say.
Instead, it was Tiona who broke the silence. Turning to Nolan she said, “I’m sorry I got you into this mess. I really only intended to offer you your first trip into space, not hijack you onto it.”
Tiona_a sequel to Vaz Page 25
