Disc

by Laurence E. Dahners

  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.

  “Ok,” Tiona said as she watched him work. He was reacting nitric acid with a white fuzzy material labeled “sheep’s wool” in one beaker. Tiona’s eyes narrowed, she felt fairly certain that the material was cotton mislabeled as wool which would mean he was making nitrocellulose. She supposed he might be making celluloid which was a kind of plastic, but she suspected he was actually making gun cotton. She wondered whether he actually remembered how to make such things or whether he’d managed to download recipes off the net without Khang noticing. In the other beaker, he was reacting nitric acid with a white solid labeled “beeswax.” Tiona felt fairly sure its label had been switched too. She thought that stuff had been labeled “pentaerythri… something” when it arrived. It was a chemical she hadn’t heard of, so she wasn’t at all sure what he might be making out of it. She hoped it was something that was going to help them get free, but it seemed like she was going to have to wait until they were actually free before she’d be able to ask him about it.

  After a couple more minutes, she turned and gave the mask back to Ko. Glancing up at her HUD she went to try to find components for the circuit. She felt fairly certain that her dad had ordered exactly what she needed, but it might not be all that easy to find amongst all the other crap he’d had the Koreans buy. He seemed to be “baffling them with bullshit” by ordering a lot more components than they needed. Tiona could see how that would make it difficult for someone looking at the orders to try to understand what they were really doing.

  Whenever Lim or Ko asked Vaz questions about what he was doing he just looked at them askance and frowned. Several times he’d told them, “Just keep a record of it. Later, ask someone smart to help you figure it out,” or some variation on that theme. From their sullen expressions the gibes struck home, but evidently the Koreans didn’t want to insist on an explanation and thus admit that they couldn’t figure it out themselves.

  As she built the circuit, she couldn’t help but wonder what it was intended to do. Lim had followed her over and asked her what it was for. She’d told him that it was a controller for the one meter disc, hoping that Lim wouldn’t notice if the circuit didn’t actually wind up in the discs when Vaz was done. The circuit had a couple of large capacitors and a high-capacity battery to charge them. There was a radio-on-a-chip and a simple microprocessor chip for which she had no specifications. The way it was wired, she suspected it would interpret an incoming signal from the radio chip and, upon the correct code transmission, charge the capacitors.

  When Tiona had finished the circuit, she showed it to Vaz. He examined it, looking pleased, then, turning away from Lim, he spoke a few words to his AI. She thought she detected a faint hum from the circuit, then Vaz proved he’d activated it by putting the tip of a probe near its output electrodes. It discharged a fat spark. He looked quite pleased as he handed it back to her. “Replace the battery and make 10 more.” He turned back to one of the shells for the meter discs he’d been working on and resumed using a small spatula to trowel his new plastic into the large groove around the edge of the disc.

  Tiona blinked, then, successfully resisting an overwhelming impulse to ask him what she was actually making, set off to build them. She knew she had plenty of components because she’d already seen them on the shelves.

  ***

  Cooper got a call from the contact Alston had assigned him in the CIA’s North Korea group. “We have a possible location for your subjects. It’s a compound not far from Pyongyang. It’s surrounded by razor wire fencing and patrolled by guards. The arrangement of the fencing is to prevent escape rather than to stop intruders. Excluding the guard shacks, the main building is in fact about 500 square meters like Gettnor specified. Most importantly, the compound was visited by Kim himself several weeks ago. It seems unlikely he would’ve visited ordinary prisoners.”

  Excited, Cooper said, “Great work! Can we set up a meeting? I’d like to bring along some of my action team to review the location, maps and any intel you have. We need to see what the options are of getting in and out.”

  “We can set up a meeting, but getting in and out of this place would be hellish. There are no good routes for helicopters that won’t alert lots of the bad guys.”

  “Damn, I was afraid of that,” Cooper said, unhappily, “but we’ve got to look it over and try to do some brainstorming. Maybe we’ll come up with something. A distraction or something like that.”

  “You can brainstorm all you want, you’re not going to get this done without gettin’ a lot of guys killed…”

  ***

  Over the next few weeks, Tiona finished precipitating and wiring 120 of the six-inch battery-powered discs. She kept wondering why they had such powerful AI chips for nothing more than simple station keeping, but refrained from asking. When Lim passed along a complaint from the supreme leader about how long the discs were taking, she dragooned both Lim and Ko into helping with some of the mindless parts of their manufacture.

  Vaz had littered the lab with parts for the one meter discs that were supposed to lift the flying car and claimed to be having trouble getting them to work. Khang said that the supreme leader was angry about the delays. Khang had given them a deadline by which time the supreme leader wanted to be able to fly his car to some kind of annual celebration.

  Tiona looked about the lab and knew that something odd was going on. First of all, she just couldn’t believe the way top and bottom halves of the one meter dishes, many of them with an array of electronic components not necessary for generating thrust, were leaned here and there around the lab. Their arrangement looked sloppy and haphazard, something Vaz would never have tolerated if there wasn’t a reason for it. Despite their apparently random placement, Tiona had several times seen Vaz surreptitiously adjust one of them. This wasn’t unusual, he constantly adjusted the position of other equipment. But with other equipment, he was adjusting it to line it up precisely with its neighbors. When he adjusted the dishes he seemed to be moving them into even more random positions.

  She heard a cry from the next room a
nd stepped in to look. Lim and Ko were excitedly watching as a one meter disc lifted into the air. Ko said, “It is working now?”

  Vaz shook his head and pushed down on the disc, forcing it toward the floor. “No, it’s barely generating enough thrust to lift itself. It couldn’t lift a car. There must be some mistake. Probably some of those substandard components you’ve supplied me with instead of what I actually ordered.”

  It settled to the floor and Vaz picked up a power screwdriver. He started to open the disc back up and Tiona stepped near, wondering if there was actually something wrong that she should try to solve. The discs he was building were quite a bit thicker than the discs they’d built back home.

  At first, she’d thought they were thick so that he could put extra batteries inside since he wasn’t building fusion plants for the Koreans. They did turn out to have quite a few of the high-powered A7 batteries he’d patented for his previous employer, but they also had some big platters in the center, mounted on powerful motors. She’d heard Lim ask about them and Vaz’d generated a nonsense answer about gyroscopic control. Each of the platters contained a star-shaped arrangement of ball bearings, though they weren’t rolling on anything so that left Tiona scratching her head. They must be some kind of weapon, but I’ve never heard of a weapon that needed a spinning platter full of ball bearings.

  ***

  Cooper wound up his plea to President Miles. Earlier, Alston had expounded on all the dangers of a rescue mission into the heart of North Korea. Now both men awaited her decision. Cooper couldn’t help feeling that Miles wouldn’t approve. After all, weren’t women just naturally less aggressive?

  Miles had turned to look out the window rather than face the two men. Though he couldn’t see it, he thought she was gently rubbing at her chin. Finally she turned back toward them. “Well, I just can’t get over those bastards sneaking in here and stealing two of our citizens. I also feel guilty for taking more notice of this attack because those particular citizens are not ordinary citizens. However, our country can’t roll over and do nothing in the face of this blatant assault without losing face, an important concept on the Pacific Rim.” She took a deep breath, “So, General Cooper I’m authorizing you to proceed. Though I bow to your expertise, I’m suggesting you might want to increase your force levels.” She fixed him with a gimlet eye, “The only thing worse than getting a bunch of our boys killed trying to rescue the Gettnors, would be getting them killed, but not getting the job done!”

  She turned on Alston, “Darby, you’ve objected fully and strenuously, and I appreciate your advice. But now that I’ve decided we should go ahead, I expect you to support this rescue with all the resources the CIA can bring to bear. Understand?”

  Alston opened his mouth and for a moment, it looked like he might try to issue another objection. But then he bit it back and said, “Yes ma’am, I fully understand.”

  ***

  In Raleigh, the garage door of the Johnson house rolled up. Moments later, the eight meter saucer floated out of it and lifted into the sky. The alarm systems that General Cooper had had installed to protect it had all been remotely switched off. No one noticed it leave. The big door slowly closed.

  ***

  In Kim Sung-Jong’s Pyongyang palace his fifteen centimeter disc received an activation code through Wi-Fi. It lifted off of its charger on Kim’s massive desk and floated silently through the enormous sleeping suite and into the room containing Kim’s immense bed. As it drifted gently over the bed, it scanned with its infrared laser. Ignoring the frightened teenager lying in the bed beside Kim because she was too small to be the target, it centered itself over the obese man.

  Then it waited patiently in the air over Kim because its AI recognized that he was lying on his left side.

  A few minutes later, the grossly fat man moved a little, then heaved himself onto his back. A loud snore broke the silence, startling awake the terrified girl next to him. She stared at him for a few moments; then rolled back to the edge of the bed. She turned her back to him and pulled one of the pillows that littered the bed over her head.

  With Kim on his back the disc floated downward until the three wire legs nearly touched Kim’s chest. The thruster reversed, pushing downward to make good contact.

  Capacitors discharged, releasing a high-frequency electrical signal.

  Kim’s heart fibrillated.

  The mountain of flesh that was Kim twitched, grunted, and heaved a few times before the lack of blood flow shut down his brain, then his body. The girl next to him clutched the pillow to her head, hoping that the motions and noises behind her didn’t signal the beginning of another sexual onslaught.

  The disc lifted and sailed back across the room, flipping over to land upside down. It connected to the Wi-Fi and sent a coded signal. The AI checked the remaining charge in its battery and recharged its capacitors. When they discharged again, they fired into a tungsten filament resting on the highly flammable plastic case of the disc.

  The disc burst into flames, and immolated itself with a fire so hot it melted the three wire legs.

  ***

  Around North Korea, 120 more discs received coded signals to activate. They also floated into the air and began to search for the men to whom Kim Sung-Jong had given them. Ninety-four of the discs found a man who, upon infrared laser scanning, matched the man the disc had been given to. Those men met the same fate that Kim had encountered.

  Seventeen of the men were gone from their homes. In those houses the discs landed themselves upside down and went up in flames without accomplishing their missions.

  In nine homes, the discs found that closed doors blocked them from reaching the bedroom. In those homes, the discs settled to the highest available nearby surface to wait. Later, when those men left their rooms, the discs floated into the air once again. They drifted over their targets, then dropped quickly down onto the men’s heads, discharging their capacitors and sending a signal into the men’s brains that induced massive seizures. Most of them died, though a few were merely brain damaged.

  ***

  Tiona woke to a hand on her shoulder. She jerked awake thinking that one of the guards had finally decided to attack her. She drew in breath to scream, but then choked it off as she recognized her father.

  Quietly he said, “Put your clothes and HUD on. Fully seat the HUD earpieces and have your AI begin noise suppression.”

  She rubbed at her eyes for a second, then picked up her clothes and her HUD and put them on, pushing the plugs into her ear canals.

  He pulled her into the corner of her room. “Cover your ears,” Vaz said, putting his own palms flat over his ears and earbuds.

  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.

&n
bsp; 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.