by Laer Carroll
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"Look!" said the man closest to one of the windows near the top of Government House. He was gazing upward at the white arrowhead perched above them.
"YOU have the binoculars."
A brief tussle followed. The man, his balls hurting, handed the binoculars to his female co-worker and sat. She trained them upward.
"It's coming down!"
He got up and limped to the window. Already the white vehicle was nearing their height. Perhaps 200 hundred feet above them he could see the English word in bright blue under the vehicle's wing: PROSPERITY. Beside it was the Chinese character for the English word.
"Fán-róng. An odd name for a warship," he said.
"It isn't, dummy. That's what this about. She said any Chinese trying to use her technology for war would suffer the consequences. I'll bet she's about to deliver some of them."
"Well, I just hope we're not caught in the crossfire."
"Look at that!"
The man didn't need binoculars to see a door open in the side of the looming spaceplane. A figure appeared in it.
"She's flying! She's flying!"
She did appear to be. She'd just stepped out of the door and began to drift like a balloon toward the top of the building. She disappeared out of their sight, surely into the building.
"Uh, oh. Somebody's about to be in deep shit."
"Maybe us!" the man said.
"Oh, she won't hurt us. I met her at a dance once. She's very nice."
"She's the fucking Dragon!"
Men are so pathetic, the woman thought. They have no intuition. It is a good thing they have women in their lives to guide them.
<>
When a nitrogen atom is transmuted to an oxygen atom the smaller volume created gives the air which contains the oxygen a partial vacuum like that of air flowing over a wing. If this is done in a large enough volume over someone the lift is enough to let that person float gently downward. This was what was happening to Jane.
She came down onto the tar-and-gravel surface atop Government House with a gentle bump. There were the usual AC and heating devices positioned around the roof. There was also a small building with a door which led into the tall building. She entered it and descended into the top floor.
The carpet was a deep red and the walls of the hall a wood or faux-wood deep mahogany. She entered a cross hall and walked unhurriedly to a side-by-side elevator and stair well. She took the stairs.
The second floor was the sole location of the Triad and its offices and meeting place, Jane knew from Robot's snooping. She located where those three usually did their collective business. They were in session, she knew when she saw the two guards standing on each side of a pair of double doors. They wore camouflage clothing and helmets and wore pistols in holsters strapped to their thighs SWAT style. Each cradled AK-47 machine guns or their like suspended from straps over their shoulders.
One crouched and brought up his weapon. Suddenly he was holding nothing. His pants and pistol had also disappeared.
The other imitated him but, seeing what had happened to his companion, kept his machine gun pointing down at the floor. The two froze, the half-naked man struggling not to cover his groin with his hands.
"Relax, boys, I'm not here to kill anybody. Or even beat them up. I just want to talk." That truthful statement nevertheless avoided a promise NOT to kill anybody or beat them up.
She walked toward the double doors between them and shooed the two of them further aside. Tellingly she opened the one leaf of the door without any attempt to guard her back. The two guards correctly assumed it did not need protecting.
Jane entered the room. Guard Number Two entered behind her. The half-naked one did not. Jane did not care but she guessed he was rushing away to get reinforcements and pants.
She stood a few feet inside the room looking at the three ultimate rulers of the Glorious Republic. The assholes who'd tried to force her to serve them against the interests of her country. Whose American goons had threatened her mother.
They looked back from ergonomic seats around a small round table upon which papers and laptop computers and plastic bottles of water sat. They were two dumpy fortyish men and a skinny fiftyish woman.
"Guard! Get her out of here and jail her!" the woman said.
Jane focused on her. "He can't do that. No one can. If they try this might happen to them."
Every item on the table vanished in a puff of air.
"It's The Dragon," said one of the men. His tone was matter of fact.
The other man seemed distressed. The woman was furious.
"Nonsense! That's a myth. Guard--"
The guard's weapons disappeared. His pants did not.
The calm man said, "See? Believe your eyes, woman."
She was silent. The calm man spoke to Jane.
"What do you want?"
Jane walked to a few feet away from the table.
"First, your assurance that my family and friends will never be threatened by an agency of the Glorious Republic. If they are, I will utterly destroy this country and send your people into starvation and eventual death. You will follow them."
"An extraordinary threat. Luckily you will never have to carry it out, a feat I believe impossible in any event."
The timid man was becoming less timid. "I am not so sure. But he is right, Captain Kuznetsov. We agree to that, though it's a needless promise. We would never threaten someone's family to ensure their cooperation."
Jane ignored the blatant lie.
"I don't agree," said the woman.
"Second, your promise that you will let the task force I led to continue developing the Prosperity spaceplane program. It will open up the Glorious Republic to an economy that is growing every day and will continue to do so. It will also put China in the forefront of history where it rightfully belongs."
The two men nodded. The woman did not.
"Third, your promise that you will cease your expansion attempts in the South China Sea. I'll leave you the illegal expansion you've already done. You would lose face to pull back. The future of China, a country that I love, would suffer."
"How very generous." The voice of Mr. No-Longer-Timid was sardonic. Calm Man made a gesture of assent.
The woman stood up so violently that her chair skated backward from her.
"No! Our expansion is ordained by..."
Calm Man had stood when she did. He reached inside his jacket, drew a small pistol, and shot her in the side of her head. She flopped bonelessly onto the dark red carpet and bled onto it.
Calm Man glanced at the shocked guard behind Jane. "You will witness that our esteemed lady took her own life for reasons you do not understand. Please leave to gather a medical team to deal with her sad demise."
The guard violently nodded his head Yes and hurried out.
Calm Man polished the weapon in his hand, crouched down, and carefully arranged the woman's hand around the pistol butt. It took some care to insert her trigger finger inside the trigger guard. Then for a moment he crouched silently, his eyes closed.
Then he stood. The other Triad member was already standing.
"My poor friend was edging into senility. Perhaps her end was better this way."
He seemed sincere. Jane thought he might actually be. But the woman's death did improve his standing. She wondered if there would be a new Triad member to keep their title a true threesome.
"Do you want anything else, Dragon?"
"I want this country to prosper. It must, for reasons you likely are unable to believe. But, yes, those three demands are it."
The Once-Timid Man was looking down at the corpse. He looked back at Jane.
"Then please leave us. Captain."
<>
Jane leaped/flew back to her spaceplane trying to shake off her shock at the sudden death she'd just witnessed. She needed to focus on the details of returning to Huiyang base and swapping Prosperity for Princess III for her return to the US. It wasn't ea
sy. She kept wondering if she could have handled the confrontation better.
But it was done. She was headed for home. To Mom, Pop, Natalie, their families, who were her families. To her crew. And to Phil.
She stepped into Prosperity, closed the door, and took a deep breath. Then she went forward, sat in the pilot's seat, and laid her hands on the familiar control yoke.
The cyborg gestalt enfolded her. The Dragon lifted HER nose and flew.
