Vaz 4: Invaders

by Laurence E. Dahners

  A sick feeling in her stomach, Tiona looked away from this relentlessly cheerful and terribly beautiful young woman. She felt like she should hate her, but the girl seemed so damned likably cheerful. As her worldview rocked, Tiona’s eyes wandered around, looking for something to grant her some stability. Her eyes passed over the living room and Tiona saw another beautiful girl staring at her over the back of the couch. This one was smolderingly dark to go with Carolyn’s bubbling fairness. “Um, no,” Tiona said, “I should’ve called…” She stepped toward the door, “I’ll… I’ll check back on Nolan later.” She pulled the door open, said, “Thanks,”—though she didn’t know what for—and fled down the sidewalk to her car.

  Awakened by the AI’s announcement that Tiona was there, Nolan finished quickly brushing the disgusting taste out of his mouth. He pulled on shorts, ran fingers through his hair, and pulled open his bedroom door just in time to see the front door closing behind Tiona. Putting his hands on his aching temples he slowly and miserably sank to his knees.

  He didn’t hear Carolyn approach, but he did hear her quietly say, “I’m so sorry Nolan. I think she was upset. I thought she must not be the jealous type or you wouldn’t have been going out…” After a thoughtful pause, she said brightly, “I could call her and tell her we’re just friends?”

  ***

  Tiona rolled to the edge of her bed, then sat up. Though she hadn’t had anything to drink yesterday she felt like she had a hangover. She’d been in bed for twelve hours and asleep for most of it, yet she felt exhausted. Something about the way she felt made her think her head should hurt, but it didn’t. She really couldn’t seem to sleep anymore, though she didn’t feel like being awake or doing anything. Unfortunately, she thought, I’ve got to get up and go to the bathroom.

  That chore done, she thought she should go eat something, but didn’t feel hungry. What’s wrong with me? It isn’t like this is the first time I’ve ever broken up with a boy! I didn’t mope around like this the other times. Thinking about it, she considered all the times yesterday that she’d rejected Nolan’s calls. She picked up her AI’s headset and settled it into place, Maybe if I get back to living my life it’ll jolt me out of this rut.

  She skimmed through a list of hundreds of messages her AI had stored while she’d been ignoring it. The AI hadn’t coded any messages as urgent priority, so she turned to the others. First she went through the ones that her AI thought were unimportant. She did this routinely out of a feeling of guilt. She knew most people just ignored the ones the AI had screened as low priority, but she always glanced over them to be sure the AI hadn’t missed anything. She didn’t see anything interesting in the file. Next she looked at the ones her AI thought were important.

  There were a lot of them from Nolan. She briefly considered telling the AI to consider all messages from him to be unimportant, but then decided she should answer at least one call from her ex-boyfriend. She owed him that for the time they’d spent together. Maybe there was a good reason why there were a bunch of bimbos over at his place. There were several messages from her mother which was unusual. I better call her back, she decided. There were also a couple of messages from Rob Marshall about priorities for the big saucer’s next mission. Before Tiona had descended into the depths of her funk, she’d told the mission team she wasn’t going on the next run to the asteroid belt. She’d put Rob in charge and he had a right to expect to hear from her. Tiona’s brother Dante had left a message too.

  Tiona decided to start by calling her brother and told her AI to put through a call.

  “Hey, ‘T’,” he said, “I heard you bailed on the next mission to the belt. Any problems?”

  “Just personal ones,” Tiona said, trying to keep the ill humor out of her voice. “I broke up with Nolan.”

  “Aw, man, I liked him. What happened?”

  To Tiona’s surprise, her brother actually sounded concerned for her, something that didn’t fit with their past heckling. Maybe we’re growing up, she thought wistfully. At first she thought of giving him a flip answer about how men were unfaithful brutes, but then decided that if Dante was acting mature, she should too. “It looks like Nolan’s found himself another girlfriend,” or two, she thought but didn’t voice.

  “That’s shitty…” Dante said. Thankfully he didn’t try to tell Tiona what to do to fix her life. Instead, he said, “Is there anything I or Linda could do? Take you out to dinner?”

  “No,” Tiona said withholding the huge sigh that threatened to break through her wall. “I think I just need to get on with my life. Get back to work. Maybe I’ll start thinking about other things.”

  “Oh, okay. That’d be great. The leadership team would really like to have a meeting with you. We haven’t had one for a while and there’re a lot of things to talk about. Could you come in this afternoon?”

  Tiona desperately wanted to say no, but after all, she’d asked for it. “How about tomorrow morning at nine?”

  “I’ll set it up.” They talked for another minute or two, but then Tiona begged off so she could respond to some of her other messages.

  Next she called Rob Marshall who was just getting ready to leave on the next mission to the belt. “Rob, sorry I didn’t get back to you right away. I had some personal issues come up. How can I help?”

  “Oh, sorry to hear that. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

  “No, no… just have some things to work out on my own.”

  “Well, what I was wanting to ask. Do you remember how we talked about bringing back a substantially bigger asteroid and placing it in orbit? Something we could use for space industry?”

  “Sure. But we abandoned that idea because separating out the different metals is best done in a gravity gradient. That means landing the asteroids on Earth which would be pretty difficult with something much bigger than the ones we’ve been bringing…”

  “Ah,” Rob interrupted, “it sounds like you haven’t heard about Applied Astrotech’s results with microgravity metal distilling?”

  “No…” Tiona briefly searched her memory, “Who’s that?”

  “One of the companies that’s rented some space in the Number Five habitat. They brought up some kind of electric furnace—it’s not clear to me whether it’s an arc furnace or an induction furnace, or maybe some kind of combination—but it’s powered by a pretty substantial fusor. They’re using it, not to melt asteroidal metal, but to actually vaporize it. Apparently this furnace is able to heat the entire mass of metal to pretty precise temperatures. That’s why I think they’re using induction—because induction furnaces tend to stir the metal around. They can apparently reach temperatures that are substantially higher than I thought you could get with electric furnaces. They take the furnace above the boiling point of one of the metals, say 2800° centigrade for nickel, then wait for that particular element to completely vaporize. They have some kind of system for condensing the metal vapor against the wall of a cooled spinning drum. Next they boost the temperature just high enough vaporize their next metal etc. etc.” He snorted, “They do have a little bit of a problem in that nickel and gold both vaporize at 2800°, but apparently they have some electrolytic means for separating those two afterward. Apparently it works very well for separating most of the other metals.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “they asked if we could bring them one of our metallic asteroids so they could practice refining metal in microgravity. I thought it would be a great opportunity for us to work out methods for bringing in something substantially larger. Especially now that there might be some call for it.”

  “How big an asteroid are you wanting to bring?” Tiona asked, trying to get her mind around the whole concept.

  “Three trips ago we pinged a forty meter diameter metallic asteroid with the radar. It should mass in the range of 220,000 metric tons. At 4 million pounds thrust the seventy-five meter saucer could accelerate it at 0.082 meters per second squared.”

  “Wow!” Tiona said not sure wheth
er she was more stunned by the size of the asteroid he wanted to bring or by the low acceleration figure. She focused on the acceleration, “That’s what, less than a tenth of a G?”

  “Yeah, 0.08G, but with nearly twenty days at that acceleration we’d have it up to 141 kps, then we decelerate for another nineteen and a half. We could have it back here and into orbit in about 39 days.”

  “You know some idiot’s going to think you’re about to hit the Earth with it, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, we don’t want to do that,” he said in a serious tone. “It’d be a multi-megaton strike, so they’d have a right to be pissed if we did.”

  Tiona thought about it for a minute. Essentially they’d be committing the seventy-five meter saucer for nearly six weeks to bring back a ‘roid that might not pay off very well. If they couldn’t actually use it in space, cutting it into smaller pieces that could be lowered down to the Earth by saucers wouldn’t be a trivial undertaking. It was also a mission that might bring them some bad publicity if the wrong people found out about it before the asteroid was safely in LEO beside the habitat. Finally, Dante would be pissed about the waste of money when he found out about it. “Is your crew all okay with this long, low gravity mission?”

  Rob said, “Yeah the crew’s pretty excited about it. We’ve started loading extra supplies in hopes you’d approve.”

  “Okay, I say go for it. I think we need to stretch our reach. Don’t talk it up though. If my brother or the other finance types at GSI find out about it there’ll be hell to pay.”

  “They’re going to find out sometime…” Rob said in a puzzled and apprehensive tone.

  Tiona laughed, “Then we’ll ask forgiveness, but they won’t be able to tell us we can’t do it.”

  “Oh,” Rob said in a considering tone. “We’re almost ready to take off, so nobody’ll have much time to say anything before we’re gone. But I’ll tell them not to call back and talk to anyone about it while we’re out there.”

  Tiona was about to call her mother when her AI said, “You have a call from Carolyn West.”

  Puzzled, Tiona said, “Who’s Carolyn West?”

  Of course her AI replied in a calm tone belying the weight of the message, “She was the young woman that you met at Nolan Marlowe’s house yesterday.”

  Actively thinking about something other than Nolan’s betrayal had been making Tiona feel better. That fact hit her with full force as her mood sank when her AI reminded her of the bubbly blonde. Why don’t AIs have enough intuition to know that you don’t want to talk to certain people?! Tiona snarled to herself as she started to refuse the call. Then she decided that part of getting on with her life was going to require that she dealt with Nolan and this… bimbo. “Put her through… Hello?”

  “Hi Ms. Gettnor!” Tiona recognize the bright bubbly voice of the blonde from yesterday morning. How can she call me acting like she’s in a good mood? Shouldn’t she at least sound a little apprehensive? Carolyn went on, “I’m just calling because I think there’s been a misunderstanding,” the girl said cheerfully. “Nolan and I are just friends. He’s such a cool guy and he seemed to be kind of lost so my friends and I have invited him out a few times…” Her voice took on a sober tone, “But I wouldn’t want you to think that we pose any threat to your relationship with him. He says you’re not answering his calls, and I know that’s just crushing him.”

  Tiona slowly let out the deep breath she’d taken in preparation to blasting the girl. Something about the girl’s cheerful tone, her concern about Nolan and the fact that she seemed concerned about how Tiona and Nolan got along had abruptly disengaged Tiona’s anger. This girl’s come between me and Nolan! How can I possibly be thinking about how nice she is!

  But she was.

  Tentatively, Tiona said, “You’re just friends?” To her amazement, she felt a little bit embarrassed about the suspicious tone she’d just used.

  “”Oh yes!” Carolyn said. She proceeded to tell Tiona about how she’d met Nolan at a party thrown by one of Nolan’s friends and he’d seemed lonely to her. She’d gathered him in and taken him out partying with her and her friends. She explained how he’d gotten so drunk that night that Carolyn had stayed over to feed him some Tylenol and bagels in the morning. She described a few of their other outings, making them seem like delightful fun that Tiona wished she could go on. “He says he hardly ever gets to see you,” Carolyn said, seeming sad for Nolan without sounding reproachful of Tiona, “with you being so busy and all. We really felt for him, such a nice guy, all down in the dumps. So, we’ve been trying to cheer him up,” she finished with an upbeat tone.

  To Tiona’s astonishment, she found herself feeling guilty. As if it was Tiona’s fault that this cheerful blonde and her dark smoky friend were sleeping over at her boyfriend’s house! “Um…” she said, trying to think how to respond.

  Carolyn said, “I know! You should come out with us tonight! There’s a concert with local bands out at the Eno…”

  Against all her better judgment, Tiona found herself asking, “What time?” Having collected the details, she found herself agreeing to “consider showing up,” though she didn’t commit to anything more than the possibility.

  Tiona sat several minutes, confounded by the effect Carolyn had had on her. The force of the girl’s personality was astonishing.

  Tiona called her mother. “Hi Mom, sorry I didn’t answer yesterday. What’s up?”

  “Oh,” Lisanne said, “I was so hoping you could visit during your layover this time. I’m wanting you to meet our young neighbor, but I’m guessing we’ve missed our chance with you this stopover. You must be about to take off?”

  “Okay…” Tiona said, puzzled as to why her mother would be so anxious for her to meet one of their farm neighbors. “I’m not actually going out on the next trip to the belt.” She paused a moment to think, for a moment considering that she might visit her parents that evening, but then remembering that she might decide to go to the concert on the Eno. “Maybe I could come by tomorrow night?”

  “That’d be wonderful,” Lisanne said, sounding surprisingly excited. “We’ll have dinner.”

  ***

  Tiona approved her AI’s query to pay the cover charge in order to enter the Festival for the Eno. She moved into the area uncertainly, realizing that the Festival was much bigger than she’d expected. Of course, she could just contact Nolan or Carolyn to ask where they were, but she had the idea that she would watch them from a distance. She thought seeing how they interacted when they didn’t know she was observing would give her a much better feeling for what the nature of their relationship really was.

  However, it looked like just finding them might be fairly difficult. There was a large craft fair that Tiona walked through. She glanced around at the people, but only stopped at one stand that had some remarkable paintings. Stepping away from it, she continued toward the sound of the music.

  Arriving at a large open area in the trees, she saw hundreds of people sitting and standing around a bandstand listening to rowdy blues music. Tiona stopped by a pole at the back to study the crowd, her eyes roaming back and forth.

  Somehow she didn’t feel surprised when her eyes finally caught on Carolyn. The blonde was enthusiastically dancing with the beautiful dark girl that had also been at Nolan’s place. A couple of other girls and two young men danced with them. Tiona realized her eyes weren’t the only ones fixed on the stunning young women. Their eyes were caught, perhaps not so much because the girls were pretty, but instead because they were so animated.

  Or Carolyn was just so excited and happy that the others were having fun just being with her?

  Tiona found she couldn’t help but smile at their antics. It was another minute or so before she realized that Nolan was sitting near them. Carolyn tried to get him up to dance, but he shook his head. However, he couldn’t keep his eyes off Carolyn and her friends—any more than anyone else.

  Tiona settled in to watch for a while.


  After about fifteen minutes, Tiona decided she wasn’t going to learn anything more by just watching. She began picking her way through the crowd.

  Tiona pictured herself walking up and sitting down beside Nolan. He’d be surprised, then they’d have a serious talk, probably walking away from the crowd to do it.

  Instead, Carolyn saw her when Tiona was probably still fifty feet away. She began enthusiastically waving, then jumping up and down. “Tiona! Tiona, over here!” Carolyn started threading her way through the crowd, toward Tiona. People nearby started turning to see what Carolyn was excited about and prompted by Carolyn’s shouting her name, began to recognize her. Although Tiona was moderately famous after the trip to rescue the astronauts, the furor had died down and nowadays she was only recognized occasionally.

  Tiona felt like she wanted to grit her teeth, but then Carolyn arrived and threw her arms around her. Over Carolyn’s shoulder Tiona saw Nolan rising to his feet, a hangdog look on his face. Carolyn started bouncing up and down in time with the music and soon Tiona found herself doing the same. Damn it’s hard to stay grumpy and serious around this girl! Tiona thought.

  Hours later, as she wobbled away from the park, having had too much to drink, Tiona realized she’d never had that serious talk she’d planned to have with Nolan. Carolyn had quickly drawn her into dancing, singing along, drinking, laughing and generally having an exuberantly awesome time. Tiona honestly couldn’t remember having had so much fun before. She and Nolan had been part of Carolyn’s party rather than a couple and it hadn’t been uncomfortable at all.